My friend Beau, who teaches 7th and 8th grade, is discussing my stories “The Broken Chest” and “Red Light and Shadow” this week with his students.
Today at around Noon, I will answer questions live, via Skype for them. I’m so thrilled. Here’s a sampling of their questions:
- Who, or what, was the Sphinxe? Does it really matter or was it just a way to pull the reader into the story then switch directions?
- Does the Sphinxe matter to the ultimate story, which isn’t really about the Sphinxe at all?
- Does the time/place/era of the story matter to the story you were trying to tell?
- What inspired this story?
In this story science and magic combine. Do you only write in the sci-?fi/fantasy - genre?
- Is this story an allegory for climate change, or was climate change a common knowledge concept that you could use to tell the story through the tree’s perspective?
- Were the shadows meant to represent anything? A real environmental threat or an allegory to mythical/fictional creature?
- Is there a hidden meaning beyond the implications towards global warming and environmental change?
- How challenging is it to combine the flow of poetry with a prose story line?
- Is the tree representative of people and their own mortality?
- Why don’t trees have souls?
