Sometimes I’ll drip words onto a page to see if they assume a shape. This is how Mama Fish came to life. I sat down with an empty head and wrote: He had a sprinkling of boils on the back of his neck that you’d swear would glow in the dark. And there it was. Not an idea, but a shape—a memory, to be precise, of a boy I used to go to school with. I hadn’t thought about him for fifteen years, probably, but he came back to me in that moment. A boy we called Dog. I moved around a lot in my youth, bouncing from school to school. I have sat in enough classrooms to know that the stereotypes (the brain, the athlete, the basket case, the princess, the criminal) hold true. The closing moments of The Breakfast Club (arguably the seminal movie of the 1980s) suggest that we share these traits to a certain degree, and I’m on board with that. However, when I dripped those words onto a blank page, I could only see the basket case. Everybody is different, and that’s a good thing. Some people, however, are more different, and that’s just plain creepy. This is the basis of Mama Fish. It’s a story about the weird kid … but it’s also about change: the change in ourselves, in society, in the times. It has been sprinkled with a little ’80s parmesan, and it owes something to the abundance of teenage movies I watched when Reagan was President and being able to breakdance earned immediate social acceptance. But, more than anything, it owes something to Dog. A boy I never spoke to, but who taught me, in his own silent way, that I’m a basket case, too.