As a child, I spent an inordinate amount of my time reading. I had this sort of sacred conviction that the most valiant thing a person could do with their life was to write a perfect novel. And I suppose I still believe that, even today. 

I wrote little stories from the time I could read, about everything from aliens to Julius Caesar. I remember crafting haphazard fragments of dystopian novels in middle school, meandering, slightly maudlin poetry in high school, and aimless, tragic short stories in college. I like to imagine that all have informed my current work in some regard.

The Greek Myths were some of the first stories that my mother read to me before bed each evening. Our family had a very nostalgic D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths, and the stories it housed fascinated me from some of my earliest recollections; the narratives of antiquity were illuminating, brutal and alluring in a way that felt very enticing to me. I sensed in them something of the shadowy infrastructure of many subsequent stories which would come to characterize my life.

Medea’s story specifically is an incredibly ancient one, polished in the mouths and minds of skilled and eloquent composers, from Apollonius to Euripides. I imagine that I found myself drawn to her for some of the same reasons that the poets of antiquity might have been. Her mind, complex and ruthless and volatile and vulnerable and resilient, defies easy categorization, as do the narratives which surround her. The Medea who scandalized antiquity commands a thousand associations and identities within the strange terrain of her semi-divine body. She is, all at once, savior and siren, mother and murderess.

And I also suspect that I felt a connection to her for reasons that are not shared by my predecessors. I found myself a little unsatisfied with the fact that frequently, when Medea is brought up in writing or conversation, she is reduced and simplified, distilled into a violent, savage creature: a witch, a kin-slayer, and perhaps most alarmingly, a bad mother.

To my mind, the whole purpose of the retelling as a distinct genre is that it serves as a kind of radical reorientation. Retellings allow historically censored protagonists the space to break free from the contexts and biases which might have previously ensnared them, and permit readers the ability to exalt in novel forms of complexity. Retellings are meant to make us question the reliability of the narrators we are given and consider the other elements of form which we might normally consume passively. I hope that my Medea makes people think critically about how storytelling, when proliferated in the interest of existing powers of oppression, can compound harm– that by doing something as simple as recentering a traditionally marginalized experience, exhilarating and vivacious narratives can spring up.

I was supposed to be hard at work on another novel when I got the idea for this one. At the inception, a strange and heady set of images came upon me in fragments, but they all revolved around this: a girl, wan and pale with her hair tied back, clothed in a simple nightdress, pacing the shadowy corridors of a convent alone in the dark, overcome by the extremity of her own devotion and sense of inadequacy towards both a distant God, and a distant best friend. She seemed to me then to inhabit a certain peril, being steadily crushed by the opposing forces of her raging desires and ruthless self-condemnation. At the time, I imagined that the story might be a short one, perhaps the length of a novella. But I grew rather attached to the characters, and questions arose—more than I had initially anticipated— that begged answers.

I began the novel with an overarching, potentially embarrassing question: what would my own personal utopia look like, bearing in mind that the word “utopia” encompasses its own paradox (it roughly translates to ‘no place’ because no perfect society can ever be truly expected to exist). At the time I was constructing this world, my particular paradise revolved around queer women existing in relative harmony, in a context which allowed, and even encouraged them, to think all day about God. It was only as I wrote, and the characters emerged (like sculptures from a rock face), that I began to realize the horrors such a context must necessarily encompass, as well as the limitations of my own ability to craft a “universal utopia” when my own experience is quite limited—by my whiteness, my class position, my education level, etc.

Writing, with or without the goal of being eventually published, is a deeply cathartic exercise. Storytelling, and the practice of applying narratives and meaning to our experiences, is such an essential part of being human. Writing, the sheer tangible process of forcing one’s thoughts, the ideal that lives in one’s mind, onto paper, into the external realms, breeds something remarkable and unexpected– a kind of alchemical synthesis which shows the writer what they know but does not know they know.

Subsequently, I firmly believe that everyone should be doing it—writing—in some form or another. Doubt, while useful, is also inevitably the enemy of the artist. Suspend any disbelief you might possess about yourself and your own abilities if you can.

Some writers are doggedly avoidant, and some are shameless exhibitionists. In the end, it hardly matters, because all work is revelatory, vulnerable. Even fiction can be autobiographical. Oscar Wilde said that “To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.” By that logic one might assume that, ultimately, creation requires a kind of encoding of the self to be great. It is a kind of discovering, which is also remembering, which is also acclimating to the impossibility of being sentient. My journey as a writer is bound together with the dreams and agonies of my characters, without any of us being necessarily aware of it. I do think that allegories and metaphors can be useful, essential even, but I also believe that the revelation of the self– the laying of one’s interior bare– without pretension– is a radical and moving pursuit.

Perhaps it is the habit of every era to imagine it exists at a kind of essential turning-point, or else to exaggerate its own importance in the scope of endless time. But I do truly believe that for all the banal familiarity of the present, it is charged with a kind of exigency—in regards especially to the world’s climate (we are already beginning to see how climate impacts natural disasters, the spread of illnesses, scarcity of resources, etc.) and still, a wealthy few choose again and again to enrich their own wealthy and power at the expense of the global community’s health. I set my latest book, All the Beastly Things, in the aftermath of Armageddon because this book is meant to be a warning: against the intersecting and related structures of oppression, hetero-patriarchy, fascism, bigotry, and apathy towards the natural world. I hope that it might engender a sort of ecological consciousness in those who read it. 

I think a great deal of the speculative future I craft has to do with my current social and political frustrations. We exist in an age of extreme wealth inequality, multiple genocides, drastic climate change, surging Christo-fascist power, increasingly authoritarian control, and the subjugation and disenfranchisement of BIPOC, trans folks, queer people more generally, the differently abled and women. Simultaneously, the current moment is one characterized by developments in the capacity of Artificial Intelligence which are being touted as revolutionary, essential, inevitable and ultimately beneficial to humanity. Although I am not interested in making the argument that AI is inherently bad or nefarious, I do believe most ardently that anything humans create will be endowed with the biases of our current society—to the extent that any ills may be drastically compounded. The danger is exacerbated by the fact that a plethora of influential tech barons are morally bankrupt and easily seduced by the outright bigotry of the far-right.

Similarly, am drawn to the subjectivities of young womxn—focusing on their complex experience as an essential component of the stories I compose. I think it is fair to say that the person at the heart of a novel—the protagonist—is in a uniquely powerful position regardless of who they might be or how they might be portrayed (by centering them, the author has made a conscious choice to delve into their interiority, which implies that their perspective in particular is in possession of great merit). We live and operate in a society which, despite its insistence of the contrary, tends to denigrate the rights and bodily autonomy of children, and disparages their interests. In the US, corporal punishment of children is legal in all fifty states, but if a person were to “corporally punish” an adult, they would end up with misdemeanor assault charges, at the very least. The current administration is hell-bent on keeping lifesaving and gender-affirming hormone treatment/ HRT from trans youth, and in doing so, steadily disassembling the bodily autonomy and human rights owed to every other marginalized group in this country.

All this is to say that there is a reason that book bans, which are designed to keep young people ignorant and isolated as a control tactic, are so popular in the United States. There is a reason that children’s literature and YA novels are consistently taken less seriously than those crafted for adult counterparts. There is a reason that the interests of women and girls are frequently written off as frivolous or shallow or sentimental.

I love to write about teenagers finding their way (despite the adults who may fail them) because I think that young people and their perspectives are infinitely important. I also believe that most adults vastly underestimate the capabilities, understandings, and intelligence of children and teenagers. In books which are so intrinsically invested in the dangers of power imbalances, sublimation, submission, and abuse, I can unfortunately think of very few more fitting plights to highlight then that of young folks, particularly queer kids of color.

It’s really more of a tier! I find myself continually coming back to Isabelle Allende, Agatha Christie, Octavia Butler, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Oscar Wilde, Tarjei Vesaas, Emily Bronte, Ann Patchett, Katherine Addison, Patricia Highsmith, Tom Robbins, Anna Dorn, Emily Tesh, Meg Howry, Sylvia Moreno-Garcia, Christopher Paolini, Leo Tolstoy, Kazuo Ishiguro, Angela Carter, and Nancy Farmer. When I think of poetry, I am inevitably drawn to Hafiz, Sylvia Plath, and W. B. Yeats. My favorite playwrights are Sophocles, Evgeny Schwartz, and Christopher Marlowe. And all of this is to say nothing of the countless brilliant and inspired fanfiction authors who have composed heartbreaking masterpieces and offered them up to others for free. There is nothing quite so utopian as the existence of AO3.