It’s one of those stories that started from like eight different directions at once. I had to put it together like a puzzle, one piece at a time. I remember sitting in a friend’s kitchen in St. Paul, working on the middle section, so it took a long time to do. Sometimes the stories I like the best work out like that: they don’t have a concrete beginning. They’ve just always been with me.

I think trucks and the desert are firmly entrenched in the Australian psyche. My husband used to work for a drilling company and drove road trains (three trailers) full of drilling equipment between work sites all over Queensland and South Australia. He’s got some crazy stories from that time, and I just write them down. I’m sorry to say the exploding cow is a true story. And his window was open.

Stories of terror and wonder are an escape from reality, but also another way of looking at our own existence, dealing with our emotional needs. Ghost stories, for instance, can be metaphors for the way we deal with our unease with death. Tales of magic are the way we fulfill the very real human need for wonder.

I’ve had an uneasy relationship with this genre, because I think there’s something very racially essentializing about the classification of ghost stories as horror. Dead people are part of my daily life, as they are for many nonwhites practicing traditions of ancestor reverence. So my Asimov’s SF story “The Rainses’” (which was reprinted in Filter House), for instance, never felt all that scary to me. But it was for some readers, because of the ghosts.

I wrote “Down Here in the Garden” shortly after I moved to California. It was during the midsummer heat, and Donner Pass was populated with vacationing families. It was a gorgeous, idyllic camping spot. Touchingly, a child had left a mason jar of dried beans at the Donner Party memorial, and a drawing of a covered wagon and pioneer stick figure girl. Beneath it in crayon: “To Patty Reid, aged 8.” At once, I felt transported back one hundred and fifty years to this same lake.