This is a wild, inventive story that takes place in a world that feels both familiar and speculative—we’re familiar with reality TV and the pandemic, but this piece manages to make these concepts somewhat alien.

What was your approach to worldbuilding in “Signs of Dragons”? How did you decide which details were and weren’t important to include?

One of my writing teachers, Robert Boswell, helped me to understand the importance of building a fictional world by leaving room for mystery and the unknown. (Check out his craft book The Half-Known World.) Most of us don’t understand our own worlds fully (I can’t name half the plants in my unruly backyard, and even I don’t know why I do all the things I do). Further, in fiction, leaving some things shadowed and unexplained creates an active role for the reader, inviting their imagination to co-create the world. So, I came from that background of thinking about worldbuilding when I wrote this story.

At the same time, I was fascinated by the idea in this story that the characters on a reality show—who are playing a game—also wouldn’t know exactly what was happening. They don’t know what footage will be used, or if the rules of the game might change. I did become interested in some specific costume and set features though: that characters would be dressed in quasi-medieval garb, living in a castle, and that there would be portal-like spaces: a giant fireplace, a big square loom, a river, a train. The contestant characters also don’t have phones or computers (unless they sneak access from a crew member), so they are missing that kind of portal or connection to the outside world. It makes the other portals take on more power in their minds and, I hope, the story.

Reality television is such a fascinating concept to me. Even when most of us realize that these interactions don’t really happen the way the shows present them, we still look to reality TV to tell us something about ourselves, to live vicariously through them.

What is your relationship to reality TV? Why choose it as a setting?

I wasn’t a reality TV fan until the pandemic when I was home with my second grader. Like so many people, we were both doing school online (I’m a college professor), and I went in the space of a few weeks from worrying about his daily screen time and the type of content he watched, to fuck it! Let’s stay on the couch and binge all these old free seasons of trashy reality shows from twenty years ago! We started with Amazing Race, with the excuse that he’d learn some geography, and he did, and he liked that. Then he saw a preview for Survivor, which I remembered only as a bunch of people in their underwear arguing and playing up stereotypes (which was the part I didn’t want him to watch), but I caved.

Those shows from two decades ago are fascinating to watch as relics of a different time—when you can tell the show thought it was being edgy by having (one!) gay character, or when racist or sexist things, microaggressions, would happen and no one would to care. Being a college professor, I took the tack of talking to my son about these things, pointing out what had happened and why it might have hurt someone’s feelings or reinforced a stereotype, and again how old the show was. (Not that I don’t think people say and do racist, sexist, and homophobic things now.) At least, that was the excuse I gave myself. We were having a critical dialogue! And we did get to the point where my kid would say “that was kind of sexist, right Mom?” And we’d get to eat popcorn, and root for the characters we loved. And pretend for a few minutes that we were on a beach someplace sunny—or anywhere, really, where we could be out in public with other people again. I did start writing this story that summer of 2020. (That’s how long it takes me to write and publish a story.)

In retrospect, I see in it my fascination with a stories occurring on multiple levels—here, there is the main character’s story of her experience, and her guessing about the narrative the producers might create through editing. And I see my loneliness. I wished I could hang out with a big group of people again, living in one space, sharing clothes and food and gossip. Maybe that’s the draw of reality TV even now. Most of us even without lockdowns and school closings live in small households, or in other isolated ways.

You have a lot of rich material in this story: a compelling world, interesting and diverse characters, a power imbalance between cast and crew, the narrator’s own experiences. What do you think including a (or the) pandemic added to the story?

Thank you. I think my previous answer sheds some light on the pandemic part. I really was just writing it during the height of that time, and I guess my imagination, and what I was feeling, wasn’t strong enough to keep it out. I did worry that because there was a (or the) pandemic in the story, it would be less publishable. (By the way, I like “a (or the)”!) I felt like some of the early lockdowns were hardly over and literary editors were saying “please no more pandemic or lockdown stories.” And I get it—there were too many and they were too similar.

At the same time, I’m old enough to remember what we all thought after 9/11. (I was in my first year of an MFA program then.) Suddenly it seemed true that a writer—if working in realism—had to know if their story took place before or after 9/11. Even if the story wasn’t going to take place in New York, how had it affected your characters? Their world view? It was that way with cell phones too. If it was a realistic contemporary story, characters had to have them and use them; they sometimes posed plot problems (why can’t she just text him?) but it would be cheating reality in some way to pretend they didn’t exist.

So, I gave myself permission to write a/the pandemic into this story. In fact, this story is one from a novel-in-stories that takes place in central Wisconsin in 2020- 2021, and the pandemic is there. (“Sign of Dragons” fits because the main character is from this region. In other stories, characters are excited there is going to be a local girl on a new reality show that is coming out… they hope she represents them well. Ha!) I also think the pandemic fits naturally in this story, in particular, because of the theme of the character not being sure of what is real or not. She is not quite sure of the boundaries of the game (like the characters on the first Survivor season), or if the friendships she is making are true or merely strategic. The uncertainty of what’s real in the world outside the show becomes an extension and then a mirror of that. Just what is this new virus? How serious is it? How long will it last?

Although I personally don’t watch a lot of reality television, I would absolutely watch every episode of Signs of Dragons if it were real. What do you think the opening credits would be like?

Thank you again! You could join my kid and me to watch. We’re now total reality TV show fans. (We like the new, kinder Survivor and we like cooking contests).

Sign of Dragons, the reality show, opens with a camera angle like from a scurrying rat. We peek out from heavy drapes and run along stone floors. We pan up to see looming, clownish humans in bright pantaloons and ball gowns, like Macy’s Day Parade balloons. The camera/rat runs up a hanging tapestry, quickly passing embroidered letters and words that—for people who stream the episode and can pause it—give clues about the challenge that will come up in the episode. The camera/rat jumps to a chandelier, looking down on the room at bald spots and cleavage, and then, after making its way down the back of a tall, gilded—and empty—throne, hurries to the basement cheese larder. There is a secret QR code within the mold growing on one of the cheese wheels. Super fans—who know to pause the streaming show—can connect to a website here where they can live chat with X8, a character who will take their directions for her actions in that show’s daily challenge… if those in the live chat can come to a democratic decision about what X8 will do before the challenge starts.

Oh, and the soundtrack is hip hop, like from a 90’s house party. And we get to see the characters, and where they are from, one by one, but they are drawn, like Kings, Queens, and Jacks from a deck of playing cards. Finally, the deck of cards is shuffled, faces down, and then fanned… and one card slides up to the top.

I’m here anytime, reality TV show producers. I’ve got lots of ideas.