We’re so pleased to be able to bring your story “Into the Dark” to our readers. Can you tell us how this story came to be?

I actually started it during a session of my writers workshop! If I remember correctly, the initial prompt was “receiving mail” and it just unspooled from there. I was probably thinking about friendships and how a close friendship is its own microcosm, and so hard to understand from the outside. The setting is pretty specifically the town where I went to college, including the rocks up behind campus; one particular landmark is, specifically, called Table Rock. The friendship is referential of one that I’ve had since college, with the added layers of magical power, and a tumultuous friend breakup.

This story is such an intimate portrait of regret and paths not taken, it reads almost like a journal entry. The past three years pushed many of us to consider the possibility that we might not see our loved ones again. What can Jessie’s story teach us about that terrible what-if?

In some ways, I think the classic lesson of “The Monkey’s Paw” can be applied to Jessie’s story. Just because you can wish for something doesn’t mean you should. This is kind of a throughline of my “witchy” short stories like this one, which include “Sugar and Spice” (Sockdolager, 2016) and “The Pearls That Were His Eyes” (Andromeda Spaceways Magazine, 2019). It is innocuous and normal to think, “I miss my friend, I hope that I see her again, maybe we’ll patch things up,” but when it turns out the friend has passed away . . . well it’s still normal to miss them, anyway. Less so, when their posthumous letter says “trust me,” to actually trust them. I think it’s also unfortunately normal to still have regrets and what ifs. What if I had reached out sooner, or at all? Did they know how much I cared?

When Jessie makes the decision to banish Angie both metaphorically and literally, it got me thinking about how ritual can be used in our daily lives –  sometimes to help us start something (like a story, maybe?) or end something, like Jessie’s period of refusing to grieve. Is ritual something that inspires you, either in your life or in your writing?

Given that I am not a planner in pretty much anything, including writing, my first reaction is to say that I don’t really have anything like that. But that’s not entirely true; first off, I was raised Catholic, and while I haven’t been to church in many years, I think there are still elements of that practice and tradition that I reach for more often than I realize, in addition to little childish rituals that I never really gave up, like wishing on the first star I see, or when I blow the fluff off of a dandelion. My writing rituals are actually very deeply entwined with listening to music. While I don’t make a playlist for every single thing that I write, I have a playlist that I fall back on from my very first NaNoWriMo (2007!) or even, sometimes, I just end up with a song on repeat. In the case of this story, it was two songs: Death Cab for Cutie’s “Follow You Into the Dark” (which was also clearly the title inspiration) and Silversun Pickups “Circadian Rhythm” (the acoustic version specifically). I’ll also often have a tab open with a solitaire game, for when I’m allowing a thought to coalesce and don’t want to continue staring at my cursor, but don’t want to get involved with a game that requires more thought than that. Prior games that filled that niche have also been the original shareware version of Snood, and Space Cadet Pinball.

Some of your details are so vivid and specific –  my first deck was a Crowley, and you’re not kidding about the vibes! –  I have to ask: Do you have a favorite tarot deck today, and if so, what makes it your favorite?

I have yet to speak with somebody who doesn’t feel that way about the Crowley deck, it’s very interesting!

Like Jessie, my very first deck was a Rider-Waite that came from a garage sale, except I neither bought it nor rubber-banded it; my best friend at the time got it for me. We also haven’t spoken since senior year, so maybe (definitely) I was pulling on that further-back relationship than just my best college friendship. During college, I got a Buckland Romani deck that was my number one for several years, and I did buy a Dali deck and again, like Jessie, I liked it but it didn’t resonate with me as I’d hoped. My current favorite is the fairly new Somnia Tarot, which has photographed imagery that in many ways sticks very close to the traditional cards (Death, the Hanged Man) and has very interesting departures with others (The Tower, Page of Cups). As the name suggests, it is very dreamlike, and I think that gentle unmooring from reality makes it all the more evocative.

What are you working on now, and what can our readers look forward to seeing from you in the future?

Right this second I am writing the sequel, in novel form, to my fantasy short story “Mistempered Weapons” (Kaleidotrope, 2022). My cyberpunk novella series, Run With the Hunted, always releases in October, which makes Run With the Hunted 5: Insert Coin to Play still fairly new, and Run With the Hunted 6: [to be determined] not really-truly in progress yet.

Sometime in 2023, I will be self-publishing the novel that I’ve been referring to as “modern witchy girl Hamlet” (not the title, don’t worry!) That novel continues to explore the throughline I mentioned earlier: that just because you can wish for something, or even make it happen magically, doesn’t mean you should. It also deals with grief and grieving, in the way that much of my short fiction does (including “Into the Dark” here) and contains a very good dog who will of course be safe.