The idea of “The Black and White” has been kicking around in my head for a really long time and was spurred by a terrible thought. I used to have this great fear that I would lose contact with my sister and the only thing that would reunite us would be our father’s death. Over time, that fear or anxiety started to change shape into something more fantastical, like many of my fears.

This story came together from several sources of inspiration—the ballet Giselle itself, of course, as well as the 1920s song “Pirate Jenny” from the The Threepenny Opera, by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht in collaboration with Elisabeth Hauptmann. Both of these are excellent revenge stories—highly recommend! I’d also recently learned more about the extremely exploitative nature of the lives of young ballet girls in 19th century Paris, when the ballet Giselle debuted.

I’ve had a Mami Wata story lurking in my bones for a minute. When I started writing I didn’t know this would be the one. though. The first working title was ‘something, something, sea-witch’ actually, and at first I was thinking it would be an Ursula-type figure that the main character beseeched. But as the tone of the story solidified, I realized it needed to be a benevolent figure, and Mami Wata fell into place naturally.

This is the second story I’ve written in an attempt to process and understand my eating disorder. The first one, “Getaway,” was written soon after my diagnosis, and it’s pretty grim. It was important to me that “The Weight of It All” end on more of a hopeful note. In that sense, writing this story was very cathartic. It enabled me to look back on the person I was not so long ago, and realize how far I’ve come. It also made me think about what gives me a sense of hope—what makes me see a brighter future for myself.

This story is “hidden lore” inside the aforementioned novel’s text—the society of algorithms hides its historical connections to Judaism, in much the same way that Christian society obfuscates and oppresses Jewish narratives. So this is a Jewish story, but at the same time, the algorithms have retold it in a way that makes sense to them.

I wanted to look at the harmful messages that women pass to each other, especially within families’ internalised misogyny that teaches daughters to be ashamed, be quiet, not be like those other women. These are messages that exist despite parents wanting what’s best for their children. I wanted to examine this without pointing the finger at a “bad guy” because family relationships are much more nuanced than that.

Music is a huge staple of my personal identity, so I think it always reflects one way or another in my work. However, for this in particular, I wanted to show every memory of the past associated with a song, the reigning anthem at that point in the protagonist’s life, as the memories themselves are often painful, and music for me has always been a useful suppressant, redirecting my mind from bitter introspection.