I was so delighted to chat with the brilliant Coral Alejandra Moore at Lightspeed about my new science fiction story, No Matter. This story came out of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, where our class had the unbelievable good fortune of studying with a week under Ted Chiang. Each week, our instructors lead us through workshops and gave us an after-hours craft talk; Ted’s was a deadly serious, off-the-cuff lecture on the precise physics of time travel and moral implications for free will. (Our class still refers to this, lovingly, as the best Ted Talk we’ve ever seen.) I’d been reading Jenny Offill’s astounding collage novel DEPT. OF SPECULATION before workshop each day, and the issues of cheating hearts, time travel, and free will tangled up in my sleepless Clarion brain and, well, this happened. I’m fiercely proud of this story, years later – it does some stuff with person and tense that was challenging and that I love a lot. Check out the story here, and hear more about the process aqui.