SmokeLong Quarterly

You’re known as an urban fantasy writer, but this piece, while it does have a magical element, is tender. Do you like to write in different genres?

I’m still getting used to being known as any kind of writer, honestly. I don’t sit down and decide what genre I’m writing. Most of my stuff ends up somewhere around speculative fiction or horror, but I just follow the story and see where it goes. I like not knowing what shelf something belongs on while I’m working on it.

I do keep wandering toward stories where people make choices that cost them something, then have to live with it. In “Rendered,” the magic is pretty awful if you stop and think about it, but I never really thought of the story as being about the magic. It’s about a mother who wants a little more time with her children and what that wanting turns into.

There is something very evocative about the speaker using her own body to create the wax to form the candle children. It echoes birthing, in the way that children do come from the bodies of their mothers. Where did the idea of a woman rendering her own fat come from?

The story started with the prompt “Candlelight.” I did what I usually do and poked at it until it got unpleasant. I kept thinking about a candle burning down, the light getting smaller, and what somebody might be willing to feed it to keep it going.

At the same time, my wife and I were figuring out what it means to have our kids grown and out on their own. Nothing tragic about it. It’s what you want for them. But there’s still this strange adjustment when the people who organized so much of your life suddenly have lives somewhere else. I think some of that found its way into the story.

The story took that feeling somewhere much worse. Once I knew this mother was trying to keep her children with her, she had to give something up to do it. I don’t trust magic that comes free. Her own body felt like the worst and most intimate place to take that payment from, and once I had the candle, using her fat was hard to get away from.

Then the part that really got me showed up: The more of herself she gives them, the less like her children they become.

Your bio says that when you are not writing, you are in the kitchen. What’s your favorite thing to cook?

If you make me pick, probably brisket. I’m happiest making something that takes longer than it reasonably should. That might be in the kitchen, but even better is out on the back porch with the smoker.

There’s something about wood smoke and tending a fire for a ridiculous number of hours that gets my mind working. I’ve had some of my favorite story ideas while I was supposed to be paying attention to a brisket. I like the fiddling around. Checking the fire, watching the bark, probing it, changing my mind halfway through, making a mess.

By the time it’s ready, I’ve usually been messing with it for most of the day, and everybody else is hungry enough that it disappears pretty fast.

Spec fic, fantasy, and horror seem to be having a moment. Why do you think that is?

Reality is weird enough at the moment that speculative fiction doesn’t feel all that far removed from it.

A lot of what people are anxious about is hard to deal with head-on. AI, climate, what happens to work, what happens to communities. Spec fic gives you a little distance. You make the anxiety a monster, or a town where something’s just slightly wrong, and suddenly you can actually look at it.

And I think there’s an appetite for weirdness again. Horror gets to say, yes, the thing you’re afraid of really is that bad. Fantasy can still offer wonder, or at least a world where the rules make some kind of sense. And the walls between speculative and literary fiction seem a lot less important than they used to.

That’s my theory, anyway. Maybe people just got tired of pretending they don’t like weird stuff.

Who is a writer that you think more people should know about?

Thomas Ha is the first name that comes to mind. His collection Uncertain Sons and Other Stories is dark and weird, but what sticks with me is usually the people.

A lot of strange things happen in his stories, but they’re almost never the point. They’re about family and fear and people trying to hold onto each other, and he usually doesn’t explain everything before he leaves. I like that.

If you want somewhere to start, probably “Cretins.” I could give you a different answer tomorrow, but that one got me. Ha starts with one awful idea, makes it feel almost ordinary, and then follows what people do around it.

More people should be reading him.