Where do you get your ideas?

Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader holds infinite possibilities. Then, too, I once saw a perfectly decrepit headstone in New Orleans with the name BASTIAN REBEL chiseled on it and vowed to use the name in a story. Yeah, sometimes vodka is involved. The most inspiring source for me though is history and travel. After reading about mortuary hospitals in Victorian times and making a visit to the UK, I wrote a story about a mentally handicapped man who invents a toe bell contraption meant to ferret out the living among the dead. That’s what history does to me — it sets pale lifeless digits to wiggling inside my head. History is better than anything I can make up.

I immediately zeroed in on the mention of ghost towns in your bio — having been to a few, I’m fascinated by them. Do you have any good stories from your visits, with or without ghosts?

Most of the stories that come to mind involve strange folks we’ve encountered in the middle of nowhere. Because we prefer to get off the beaten trail, it’s surprising enough to run into another four wheel drive bumping along in a similar direction, much less stray people. A man who looked like Charlie Manson once walked straight out of the ether and into our camp to mumble something completely incoherant, then disappear again. Because we were not far from Barker Ranch, where they arrested a large number of the family back in the day, his sudden appearance was even more spooky. Maybe it was a lost hippie still wandering the hills looking for his leader? I still wonder what he was trying to say. Another time, we passed a man standing outside his van in the blistering heat on a plain of endless scrub. He had an easel set up and he was painting, buck naked. Another naked fellow walked by us once and tipped his cowboy hat. He was wearing boots and a bandana around his neck and nothing else and I’ve never been able to cleanse my mind of the image.

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Daniel Homan was born in Gainesville Florida and now lives in Austin, Texas. He teaches at Texas State University. In his free time, Daniel has been researching Ponce De Leon, the fountain of youth myth, and 15th century Spain for a new novel. Also, he is working on two internet series, one animated, the other involving puppets. Currently, Daniel is seeking representation for a narrative-nonfiction book, The Israeli Trail, about his travels in South America with Israelis recently released from the Israeli Defense Force.

Tell me a little about The Queen of Hearts. What was the first image or phrase or impetus that made you sit down and spin it out?

Long before it was commissioned into a novel, I actually wrote The Queen of Hearts as a poem. This was in 2002, after an incredibly vivid nightmare, most of which made it into the major scenes of the story and forthcoming novel. What I remember most were the city scenes, a crowded, frenzied market, wave after wave of people spreading rumors and gossiping about a murder. Behind me was a striking woman, mysterious, ethereal, but I didn’t know why she was with me. The nearby market-dwellers, which I came to call the “louts,” were whispering about black hands and the murder, and there was something searching for me.

The nightmare flashed between these street scenes and a high-society poker tournament in a manor on the hill. After I had woken, I wrote out the verse quickly, just to rid myself of the images, but I found the images compelling and they stayed with me for many years, even past the completion of the book.

The nightmare was after 9/11, of course, and in the writing of the novel, I came to realize that this probably had played a large part in the nightmare. Then, as the Iraq War commenced, the Patriot Act, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, the heavy stuff of my generation basically, the essence of the story became clearer.

The first line of the story/novel I remembered word for word from the nightmare, spoken by some unknown narrator: “But one question remains, did it begin or end in theft?” That was the mystery that I wanted to explore.

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Willow Fagan was born in Southeastern Michigan, during an April snowstorm. He now lives in Ann Arbor. He appears to be in the “twenty-something-not-really-sure-what-he’s-doing” phase of his life. Currently, he works part-time as a tenant counselor informing tenants about their rights, while reading Tarot cards and engaging in various writing and activist projects on the side. Of these projects, he is most excited about a workshop that he will soon present for the second time: “Sculpting the Chaos of Trauma into Narratives of Change.” In general, he is drawn towards the intersection of creative expression, social justice work, and personal healing. His stories have previously appeared in Fantasy Magazine and Behind the Wainscot.

Tell me a little about Scatter and Return, the Eyes of the Princess. What was the first image or phrase or impetus that made you sit down and spin it out?

When I sat down to write this story, I opened with the line that remained the same throughout all the drafts to the published version: “Yes, yes, the princess is locked in the tower.” But there was some contemplation and coalescing of images and situations that I did before I began to write. I knew that I wanted the princess to have locked herself in the tower as a response to abuse from her father. That image resonated with me because of my own experiences of abuse from my father.

So this story is an example of the type of stories — those which turn the chaos of trauma into narratives of transformation — that the workshop I’m presenting focuses on. Writing the story helped me process and integrate my own traumatic experiences, a process which is mirrored within the story by the narrator’s strategy of telling stories in order to coax the missing pieces back to the princess.

I’m hesitant to reveal all of this but I think it’s important for survivors to speak out about their experiences. I also hope that this story helps others in some small way to understand their own histories and perhaps even to catch a glimpse of a path towards wholeness

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