The title occurred to me while I was assisting with summer classes at a middle school near my university over 2011 or 2012, and I found myself supervising the basketball court at recess (although why my students struck me as royalty of the nocturnal variety, I don’t recall anymore). Later that year, still in my student teaching, I experienced my first school lockdown, and that experience—waiting in a small space for who-knows-what, surrounded by the familiar objects of my classroom while startling and unfamiliar noises sounded in the hallway—ultimately shaped the frame story of Batul in her apartment.

I just survived a three-year MFA in Illinois. During that MFA, I took a literature course on the American Gothic, and later, did a number of independent studies of my own design to follow up on specific subgenres of this that interested me. All of these involved producing an annotated bibliography at some point, so I got pretty good at it, and also increasingly fascinated by how annotated bibliographies consist of interlocking components that tell a story larger than the sum of its parts. Because academic notions of objectivity be damned—a story is exactly what a bibliography is telling, one that has been deliberately constructed.

Two of my favourite things went into the writing of “Malotibala Printing Press”—I grew up reading lots of horror stories in Bengali, of which there is a tradition of over 200 years; and I am trained as a Publishing Studies scholar. Calcutta, the city in India where I’m from, has the oldest tradition of printing in South Asia. I didn’t use the name of Calcutta in the story, but every other detail in it is historical, including the name of Chitpur Road where the printing-press neighbourhood came up around the early nineteenth century.

I attended the Institute of American Indian Arts for my graduate degree, and while I was there I met a lot of Indigenous women who were putting their unique voices out there and bringing attention to an often-ignored crisis. Two of these writers, Toni Jensen and Terese Marie Mailhot, stood out to me with their commitment to addressing the reality of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. During a lecture, Terese spoke about the importance of naming these women, and she did.