I like writing about teenagers because everything is so vivid and immediate to them, and they make bad decisions on the reg, which is more fun in fiction. Also it was nice outside, and I was sitting on the porch looking at all the mayapple umbrellas popping up, and I thought, “How could I ruin this?”

fooey to “genre purity.” Horror without a point of view is just an autopsy, horror without effective prose just an exercise in poring through the thesaurus for synonyms for “viscera.” I sure as hell don’t know the precise dividing line beyond which a work of fiction stops being just a story and starts being literature, but by God, I know when I am deep in that country, and appreciate finding myself there.

I got my MFA in Popular Fiction from University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast Program, so my MFA experience was a little different than some people’s. Still, even in a program with a Popular Fiction focus, that tension existed. I also experience it every now and again in other various communities I’m part of. It boils down to a misunderstanding, I think; genre is more than Clarke and Tolkien (both of whom I love, but realize they’re not everyone’s cup of tea), but people don’t realize the breadth of genre.

I think (I hope) that the story is about increments. It’s about exhaustion. Here again the story leaps from this fear and shame and disillusionment I felt and still feel. It’s not a very hopeful story. It offers no alternatives or solutions. But it does explore this idea of resistance and acceptance. Diego has every reason to resist. The setting of the story is actively toxic for him, erasing his bisexuality, erasing his past, erasing so much about him. He has no job, and the system is designed to ensure that in order to live he has to lie constantly, which only feeds into his own doubts and insecurities, his own erasure.