Banyans are great because you can think of them as individuals, but they’re also landscapes in themselves. If you step under an old banyan, the sort that has acquired buttresses and put down root-pillars and started shading tracts of land under its canopy, it can feel like you’ve stepped out of the mundane world, into somewhere else with entirely different rules.

Magic (be it real or imagined) can bring wonder and joy, and I wanted to take a setting that’s usually quite grim and layer in beauty and hope. I chose to combine the “real” magic of calling the rains with the equally important but less tangible magic of love, optimism, altruism, and compassion that the Rainmakers also share.

I like to think as a society, we’re trending towards believing victims more often than not, but we definitely have a long way to go. I think part of why is what the protagonist says, “It was much easier to believe in attention-seeking girls than in trust-shattering boys.” It’s easier to think that there was some sort of “misunderstanding” or the victim is simply lying than to believe that some actor we admire, or a person we trusted and thought of as good, is actually a monster.

This phenomenon of entitled men and suffering women is universal, but my experience of it derives from my culture. I think I was using this story to speak out against this status quo, and while this story takes place in historical times, the imbalance between how men and women are treated has not improved substantially even in recent times.

I do legal support on behalf of Tribes and run across this friction between tribal traditional use and non-Indian use, which could be commercial/industrial development or, as in this story, recreational use of a sacred site. Colonizer law provides for protection of religious rights, but not all religions are treated equally. Tribes lose access to or see their sacred sites damaged or destroyed. This isn’t something from history. It’s happening right now. Those thoughts inspired the rest of the story.

Living in New York City for so long, in neighborhoods like the Upper East Side, yet in subsidized student housing, and then living in Harlem, I was always struck by the apparent modernity of NYC contrasted with its stark class and race disparities. There was so much privilege and poverty, and a racial divide that struck me as very distinct. I don’t know why I was surprised by that, but I was. There is a way, in particular, that living in NYC makes you callous to others, including the unhoused.

But in my case, during summer, I had one of those days. From my bed I could see my daughter playing in the yard. Very much like the protagonist in “Moss and Dirt,” I watched her play—worried with normal mom concerns and feeling a bit down that I couldn’t spend the day with her too.

Being powerless and voiceless for too long creates a weird dissonance. So when a ray of hope actually presents itself, it comes as a shock. It’s only when that initial feeling of shock and helplessness abates that one can learn to pick up the pieces and move on.

For me, in this story, colonialism was a bigger issue. I live and teach college English classes on the edge of the largest reservation in the US, the Navajo reservation, and many of my students are from the nearby Hopi and Apache reservations as well. How could I have a story set in Holbrook, AZ, with no Native characters, and yet how could I, a white writer, create a believable and non-stereotyped Native character? Merlene is a woman and has depression because those are two things I do know about, and I tried to add a touch of reference (the ‘rez,’ her aunties) without overstepping.