This story, at first, felt disorienting for me, as the reader. The setting and characters were vague and unsettling. Yet as the story progressed, it all came together. When writing this one, how did you determine how much to tell the reader versus how much you would leave for the reader to figure out on his or her own? Was it more of a consideration for you for this piece than others?

The protagonist, Esther Aidan, does not know when she’s awake or dreaming. Sometimes she thinks she is awake and is not. Sometimes she thinks she is dreaming and is not. I wanted for her to struggle towards clarity, so that, asleep or awake, she was making choices of her own.

I do think that too much vagueness and disorientation–especially in a first person narrative–is alienating to a reader. That was never my intention; that would be tantamount to self-sabotage. I did want the protagonist to be a compelling enough narrator that a reader would follow her even into her own overgrown labyrinth, knowing, even before she does, that she would extricate herself again.

“The Last Sophia” alternates between a first person narrative and letters. What inspired you to use this format?

Well, I love epistolary stories. I can’t help myself. If a letter is kind of like an act of complicit voyeurism and reading like that of telepathy, I think an epistolary story satisfies our human appetite both for the amazing mysteries of mentalism and for plain old vice. Also, structurally, alternating letters with stream of consciousness was a way to differentiate between the protagonist’s lucid moments and her febrile ones. Then again, she’s not–as she’d be the first to tell you–the world’s most reliable narrator. Was she ever really writing letters, or just dreaming them? Is she thinking her thoughts or speaking them aloud? Who can say? No one. Except, perhaps, the last Sophia.