What was your initial inspiration for this story, and how did you keep it all in your head as you were writing it?

This story started, as most of my stories do, with me mashing together a bunch of ideas.

I started brainstorming for “We Will Teach You How To Read | We Will Teach You How To Read” shortly after working with Ken Liu on “Collaboration?”—a story that played around with a lot of different formatting. One of the things I became fascinated with was the idea of conveying meaning in the juxtaposition between two (or more) columns of text. For one section of “Collaboration?” I used that effect to create a futuristic variation on traditional photography, and one of the initial seeds for “We Will Teach You How To Read” was definitely that.

My academic background is in psychology, and when I was trying to get this story to come together I started reading a bunch of articles on attention, working memory, language acquisition, and more generally how we learn new skills and information. As I was researching, I got it in my head that what I really wanted was to somehow train people to do something that, cognitively, we simply do not do.

The closest parallel to the effect I wanted comes from musicals. There are times when multiple characters sing different lines at the same time. One such example is a section of “The Confrontation” from Les Misérables, where Javert and Valjean have overlapping lines. I listened to it on endless repeat for a couple hours (on a plane ride), and I decided that under very specific conditions, I could create for myself at least the illusion that I was processing two streams of linguistic information at once. Auditory processing is a bit different from visual processing, but it seemed at least plausible that I could teach people a new way to read.

I also always love aliens that are genuinely weird, and playing around with time/timescales is a recurring element in a lot of my fiction.

As to how I was able to hold it in my head . . . I’m really not sure! I do know that this story was a stretch for me, right at the edge of what I could grasp, cognitively. Once I had the words of the simplified story, I wrote it really quickly—and I do think there was a sense of urgency to the writing, like I was worried if I didn’t get it down fast enough I’d lose some of what I was trying to do.

This story presented a lot of formatting challenges to publish it, as anyone who has read it can probably guess.  (Strangely, if you had published this before ebooks, it would have been a lot easier to print; reflowable text is great, except when it’s not!) But did you also face challenges with formatting when writing the story—making the “stanzas” contain all the text you wanted on each line in the left columns (opposite the “This is our story, simplified” stanzas), the vertical text, etc.? That, and conceiving of how to render this uniquely alien narrative, seems like it must have been quite difficult.

The format of the story definitely presented a lot of constraints, to the point where as I was writing I really wished I had more background in poetry or songwriting. (I did read some poetry while I was brainstorming, and in some alternate universe I can envision a version of this story where the aliens communicate in strictly metered verse.)

Particularly at the start of the story, I often wanted more words on a line than I had space for, so the initial stanzas were tricky to write. Later, I ran into limitations with the width of the page. Because we don’t generally read several columns of text simultaneously, my word processor isn’t designed to display things that way. Once I got past the point of four columns, I had to come up with a way to make everything fit, and text strung out vertically was the only way I could think of to do it.

I actually really enjoy working with those kinds of constraints. One of the biggest roadblocks I often have with writing is trying to keep things focused. With a blank page, you can write anything, and having too many options can be overwhelming. Trying to fit everything into a smaller number of words makes it more manageable, and as someone who writes a lot of flash fiction I found that appealing.

In telling much of the story in a multi-column format that is intended to be experienced all at once, how did you determine how to present the information in a way that was understandable by a reader accustomed to only reading one thing at a time?

Giving people even the illusion of reading two things at once was a huge challenge, and I came at the problem from a lot of different angles. The main one was trying to reduce the working memory load as the story progressed. On average, people can hold between 5 and 9 things in working memory—numbers, letters, words. At the start of the story, some of the lines within are slightly longer than 9 words, by the end, each line has far fewer words. Repetition of the right-hand column also helps decrease the working memory load, and it is increasingly familiar as the story goes along.

Another thing I spent a lot of time thinking about is the way attention works, and I fell down a rabbit hole of optical illusions. There’s a category of optical illusions that are ambiguous images—one famous one is both a rabbit and a duck, another is both an old woman and a young woman. People start off by seeing one image or the other, but once you know what both images are you can often flip back and forth. These kinds of illusions were an interesting reference for this story because they make use of how our brain processes visual information—everything from edge detection to object recognition. So optical illusions were definitely a template for me, I really wanted to break down the cognitive processes in a similar way, but with words/linguistic processing instead of pictures/visual processing.

You mentioned that one of the seeds for this story was found in “Collaboration”; what were some of the other seeds? Were there other stories you looked to for inspiration? If so, I specifically wondered if Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” (the basis for the film Arrival) was among them.

Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” is one of my favorite short stories of all time. One of the notes I made myself in the early brainstorming stages was to try to recreate the shift of thought that happens in “Story of Your Life,” but with the reader as the protagonist, trying to get them to process the words in a whole new way.

Literary influences are often less deliberate for me: ideas from stories that I’ve read shape the way I write, even if I’m not consciously thinking about them at the time. One author who comes to mind for this story (and many of my others), is Vernor Vinge, who was one of my Clarion West instructors and sadly just recently passed away. He was brilliant at creating aliens that are genuinely weird, and the Tines from A Fire Upon the Deep are another one of my favorite examples of aliens that think in ways that are fundamentally different from humans.

Shifting to movies, another spark for this story was the proliferation of multiverse stories—Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, and several of the Marvel movies but especially Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. “We Will Teach You How To Read” is not a parallel universe story, but watching a lot of multiverse movies is one of the things that got me thinking about parallel processing and having lots of things happening simultaneously.

When I accepted the story for Lightspeed, I was a bit excited about it. (And I don’t normally do author spotlights, so that tells you something about how much I love this story.) Do you want to tell people about the rather effusive acceptance letter I sent?

This was possibly the fastest acceptance I’ve ever had, and it definitely contained the most instances of glowingly enthusiastic profanity! Not only were you excited, but you were excited about the specific things that I love as a reader and try so hard to capture as a writer—ideas, novelty, and sense of wonder.

It really meant a lot to me. I even printed out the email and put it up near my desk, to serve as encouragement on the darker days when it is hard to write.

What are you working on now, and what’s coming out next?

I’m working on an assortment of short stories in various stages of progress—one about an AI dating app that does all the chatting for you, a couple different secondary world fantasies, some near-future environmental-themed SF, a sentient house murder mystery.

What’s coming out next? I got to write a Peni Parker story for the middle grade anthology Spider-Man: Stories from the Spider-Verse, coming out this fall. It was my first time writing a tie-in story, and definitely cool to get to write a character that has her own action figure!