The story is poignant and draws upon the themes of love, doubt, and isolation. Why do you find yourself drawn to these themes? What other themes do you find yourself exploring in your work?
I think we as a culture have some deeply problematic and unhealthy notions about love and that doubt and isolation are the inevitable consequences of that. I'm a not-very-well-closeted romantic, but run against really stupid notions about romance and love constantly, so I spend a lot of time being grouchy about them, and then writing fiction that deals with it. Idealizing youth and consequent stupidity, and our cultish obsession with hope are other things that I tend to gripe at and then wind up with fiction about. I wrote an entire novel on the premise, "Romeo and Juliet were idiots, but what if they weren't, and that feud was about something that mattered?" I'm probably in the running for youngest cantankerous nihilist.
You also run the Strange Horizons podcast. How did you end up doing that? What do you enjoy about it?
I pulled Julia Rios aside at WorldCon and told her to give me the job or I was going to force feed her tapioca pearls until she joined my cult based on the worship of bubble tea. She politely told me that I was creepy, insane, and ought to be talking to Niall Harrison instead.
More seriously, Strange Horizons has been my favorite magazine since I started reading short fiction. It is, in fact, the magazine that got me reading short fiction, and consequently, writing it. And when I quit working horrible corporate desk jobs I also lost all the time I'd spend reading fiction during movies when I was allegedly paying attention to doctors squabbling over the oxford comma's importance in their software. Instead, I started listening to fiction podcasts which was great for keeping up with places like Clarkesworld, Lightspeed and Beneath Ceaseless skies, but didn't help at all for Strange Horizons. When a year went by and I hadn't read a single thing from Strange Horizons, I decided it was time to do something about it. Which brings us to the first part of my answer, which is more or less true if you take out the part about tapioca.
Why write? Surely there are so many other, far easier, things you could be doing?
Writing isn't hard, and it's a great deal of fun. I'm not one of those writers who has to pry every word out of their soul with an ice pick, or who's overcome with shame and self-loathing when faced with their work. Intellectually I can understand why those writers keep writing, but viscerally I find it utterly confounding. If I'm writing, it's because there really isn't anything more compelling for me to do at the moment. Besides, it's the only way I know of to commit murder or end the world without exerting a great deal of effort and risking an expensive, time-consuming trial.
What are you working on at the moment? Where can our readers find more Anaea Lay?
At the moment I'm drafting a novel about a woman with two boyfriends who is the first of the women in her family who doesn't see glimpses of her future, and the ways these things interact when she moves home to take care of her elderly grandmother. For short work, I've started creeping up in a lot of places. I have a story coming out in Lightspeed early next year (Salamander Patterns) that's probably the happiest ending I've ever written, though I think the ending of my story in Daily Science Fiction last October (Doomsday Will Come With Flame) was pretty cheerful, too. Then again, I've been known to utter the line, "It's okay, there's problem solving through cannibalism at the end," so my concept of cheerful might be off.
If you're looking for me, and not just my work, I natter on quite a bit at my A, which I love more than it warrants.
https://waylinesmagazine.com/
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