I think it’s actually commonplace among writers to borrow bits and bobs from life, sometimes even including their own, to build the telling details that give a fiction some depth of field. Words pretending to be worlds—which is not every story, granted, but at least those attempting this to any degree—need to suggest that a story is like life, that there’s more to what’s on the page than what’s actually on the page, like how in life there’s no bottom to the depths you can uncover from a person or object or situation: if you pull any thread long enough, the entire universe unravels from it.

My studies certainly play a major part in how I come up with ideas and in the way I approach character and plot. For example, I often touch on the theme of the world as theatre or draw directly from Greek tragedy, while religion and intertextuality are at the core of many of my stories. But it’s not just the ideas; my studies have shaped the way I view the world, and so the lens through which I approach story. My media & cultural studies background has taught me that culture is the result of practices of representation and articulation, which always invites one to question and study power—where it resides, how it articulates the world.

Shorts are great if I have one discrete idea with just a few characters. I can focus on a scene, a single encounter, a single incident. For “The Island of Beasts,” I really wanted to focus on this meeting between werewolves on a remote island. I didn’t want to explain the entire world, all the characters’ histories, what happens next. Short stories mean I can really bring that microscopic focus in and not have to stretch and expand past that. Ultimately, I find I can really pack a lot of conflict and character into those brief, intense moments. That can be very satisfying.

I’ve done cosmic horror before (see my very short story “Windshield,” or “During the Pause” over at Apex), whenever it suited my purposes to reduce my protagonists to the level of ants. I’ve enjoyed other practitioners following in Lovecraft’s footsteps, though not the man’s own work (I find him dire). Generally, I think horror is scarier when the menace is comprehensible, but think there’s room, once in a while, for a glimpse of something too big to be understood.