In “Tom Is Dead,” there’s a tension between how you remember Tom, using a sort of aside to capture his memory, and how you imagine Tom to be feeling in the moment of his accident. How do you feel memory serves your writing, especially when writing about tragedy at the forefront?

I have a good memory. Many times when I recall a tidbit that seems unbelievable it ends up being true anyway when I try to “fact check” it with a computer or someone else. With this kind of accuracy I can sort of report on my own past like a journalist. I’ve tried writing about memories as if they were sweet sentimental bygones, but that’s a lot harder for me to do. So my writing usually feels like a Florida Man news report.

With my little eulogy to Tom and questioning him about how he died, I’m trying to get on his level and have a real conversation for the first time, as he never really liked me and we never connected.

“There is no schadenfreude here. I only feel guilt and confusion.” This is an interesting thought, as though readers would anticipate the writer as being in some way pleased at the tragedy, however vaguely—a sort of comeuppance on the siblings’ parts after a fallout that clearly still resonates with both the writer and the siblings.

What I actually read in this piece is the opposite—that guilt and confusion, perhaps about car ownership, perhaps about the falling out. Maybe there’s a third sort of amorphous guilt underlying the whole piece. How did your feelings of guilt and confusion affect the way you wrote this sensitive narrative?

For a few years I felt like I wasn’t able to have an opinion and emotions about Tom’s death. When I wrote this, I felt like I wasn’t allowed to and that the family would perceive me as a vulture creating an art piece about their traumatic experience. But when I wrote it I started feeling so much better, as I suppose I was working through unexpected grief. Publishing this amplifies my worry about being perceived as a vulture. But it’s still my own experience I have the right to talk about. And if the family sees this and get upset, it’s probably because they decided to dig up the past and look on my website, which is their own problem.

There is a message in the piece that cars are dangerous to cyclists, a true and obvious fact. But I didn’t necessarily feel like this piece centered on that. I felt more gravitation to the way people deal with familiar devastations, just by knowing each other, despite the status of relationships. I can attest to this, since social media allows us to know everything that happens in each other’s lives, whether they’re old high school classmates or mutuals or estranged family members. I almost feel like this piece explores a tangential hardship: the difficulty of knowing at all:

“I got furious at Julia for telling me all that.”

“I found out the day after it happened, through his son Jack’s former roommate. I told my mom and she Googled ‘Santa Cruz bicycle death.’ She sent me hastily written breaking news articles. Is this how journalism works? Injury lawyers had reposted the story on their own blog to get clicks, too.”

There’s so much text that gestures at how you and the others found stories out—all the facts and the speculation existing in tandem. Can you speak to this idea of knowing as a sort of burden in some way?

I think this is a theme I focus on often: the inevitability of knowing people and the risk of something bad happening because of this. Simply by existing you meet people, and you never know if something bad will happen involving one of them. If a person wanted to do something like emotionally harm you, you could avoid it to an extent by distancing yourself after seeing strange behavior. But something like death could happen very suddenly. The alternative is to live a cold existence where you don’t form meaningful bonds with others. Perhaps in the near future there will be people who only have friendships with AI as to prevent these types of unpredictable tragedies.

This concept has fueled an interest in time travel fiction for me: what would happen if we weren’t bound to this concept of “potential disaster just by existing”? For this reason I far prefer voluntary time travel stories (11/22/63, Primer [which is a movie]) to involuntary time travel stories (Kindred, The Time Traveler’s Wife). Of course in those first two stories, time travel creates way more problems than it solves, but it’s the “what if” that does it for me.

I loved how small this piece was. Sometimes smaller things carry more weight. How did you approach the brevity of this piece?

I took a writing workshop at community college early this year and I was surprised to find that we were only allowed to write flash. I was against the idea at first but it turned out to be a really effective technique. I wrote this piece in the class. If it were longer it would have included more details about my relationship with the siblings, which could have easily turned to navel-gazing.

We’d love to know what you’re reading now and what writers inspire you.

Ever since that abortion ruling I have been reading New York Times, The Atlantic, and Reddit for only the most inflammatory political content. I am trying to break out of this. I am also listening to that Jennette McCurdy memoir that everyone is reading. I love memoirs about weird parents. Some writers that inspire me are Joyce Maynard, Chuck Klosterman, and the blogger Tim Urban. My taste is not particularly literary.