SOILBORNE
Horror surrounding birth and babies is effective. Carrying a child and giving birth has to be one of life’s greatest highlights. Children are one of the most precious gifts we receive. Anything going wrong with either of these punches you in the gut. Hard. Stillbirths are devastating. Any loss of mother or child is world-ending. I came across a social media post where this couple could not conceive due to problems with both the mother’s and father’s biology. I wondered how heartbreaking it would be to want a child and being denied on a biological level.
WOUNDED
Ah, spell books, guilt, addiction, broken relationships, missing siblings, and revenge. I’d say that’s a decent combination for a story with lots of emotional turns. I said a lot with this story and delved into many issues plaguing Indian life, both past and present. Alcoholism affects many families but is widespread in Indian Country. It leads to other health ailments and opens families up to both mental and physical abuse. My late stepfather inspired some of this story. He suffered from alcoholism until his death in 2016. The grandfather briefly mentioned in the story is Chatan Wounded, which translates to Wounded Hawk. No family likes to delve into its checkered history, so I won’t speak ill of the dead. Like any man taking the new title of stepdad, he had a complicated road ahead of him. He was in my life for sixteen years and had quite the impact, good and bad. I’ll miss him. With this story, I also wanted to pay respect to the crisis of MMIWG2S and bring it to my readers’ attention. It’s a gigantic problem that requires awareness. We have to do what we can. Where do we go from here?
ORANGE
Orange was the second story in which I took a stab at flash fiction. Flash fiction is a different ball game than other short fiction. It may seem easier on the surface, but it forces writers to cut away all fat with a machete. Flash fiction is lean and mean. Do you know how hard it is to elicit emotional reactions from people with so few words and include a foreshadowed twist?! I worked more on Orange and Soilborne than any other story in this collection. A mixture of things inspired this story: my personal battle with depression, my dad’s cool personality, racism toward Indians, and Showtime’s Dexter. With Orange, I aimed to showcase how I experienced depression. I lost interest in many things, didn’t know what to do with myself, and forced myself to reminisce to the ever-fleeting “good ol’ days,” the halcyon days of yore. I entertained myself by creating my very own Indian Dexter. The TV show character, from what I watched, always killed the bad guys. I wanted to show what could happen if a person, blinded by alcohol, hatred, and despair, walked down a destructive path.
IMITATE
The title of this story is on the nose, (IMI- being a palindrome, or a mirrored prefix, and -TATE being, well, the boy’s name) but on the nose is fun sometimes. I drew inspiration from Kealan Patrick Burke’s novella, Sour Candy, which freaked me the hell out. I also injected 1980s horror movie nastiness, with all their grotesque practical effects, into this story. And maybe a dash of Pet Sematary.
DEAD AMERICA
This story was fun to write and my wife told me it was my most well-written one at the time. The title came from my dad. We were texting one day, and I sent him a picture of an altered half-dollar coin I found on the internet. It had an Indian chief, but his face was a skull. I’m all about the morbid and weird and thought nothing of it, but my dad replied, “Dead America.” I sat there and pondered his interpretation for a few minutes, and it lodged itself in the back of my brain like a popcorn kernel between molars. The story itself is meta. While writing this collection, I came across “writer’s block” despite all the ideas pinballing between my synapses. I did repetitive motions with my hands and paced around my house to trigger something, anything. My smoke detector went haywire, too. Drove me nuts. Also, spiders suck. No one likes them. If you say you do, you’re a liar. Researching the movements and body composition of spiders made me shiver. So did writing that sentence and revisiting that memory.
TRANSFIGURED
I love werewolves, but they’re no longer scary. They’re so ubiquitous in pop culture to the point of being seen as harmless. The same has happened to zombies, mummies, (Were mummies ever frightening? Under Wraps was awesome.) witches, vampires, and other classic horror characters. My main vision for this collection was to include a story involving a werewolf, hence the cover art. The image on the front of this book is a traditionally terrifying werewolf because that’s what everyone loves, including me. Because they aren’t scary anymore, werewolves are more of a vehicle to tell other stories now. Think of Stephen Graham Jones’s Mongrels. In my mind, the modern werewolf is a perfect allusion to some people in the LGBTQIA community. My werewolf is genderfluid. They struggle with the transformation between biological woman and werewolf because of the strict adherence to one or the other depending on the sun and moon. They wish there could be a blending of the two, but the witch permanently set the spell this way. The main character wishes to identify more with the werewolf side rather than the human side, but that wasn’t always the case. My gay and transgender friends influenced the main character. While researching Anoka, Minnesota, I came across the “1991 Halloween Blizzard” which tore through several Midwest states on that Halloween night. According to Minnesota’s government website, Anoka received the most snowfall, almost thirty inches! I felt compelled to include that in a story. Why not this one? It’s also a story of not experiencing the best childhood and wanting nothing but to recreate it as an adult. The main character never had the chance to partake in the awesomeness of Halloween festivities and feels a belonging to this collective. Trying to belong to something new doesn’t always work out as planned.