There’s a particular moment, just before the sun rises above the houses at the end of our street, when the light turns the treetops copper. The shadows stretch, the birds awaken, and for a breath or two, the world feels both ancient and oddly delicate. Like something could slip through a crack in the sky if you looked too long.

That’s the kind of space I like to write in.

My stories don’t often shout. They whisper. They curl into your ear like fog and make you look sideways at something you thought you understood. Whether it’s in Composite Creatures, with its quiet rot beneath a carefully maintained surface, or Mothtown, where the past seeps through every page like damp through wallpaper, I’m drawn to the strange and the silent. The in-between places. The unspoken.

Poetry taught me this. That words, placed just so, can hum like tuning forks inside your bones. That a single line can stop you in your tracks, not for what it says, but for what it shows you without warning. A tree with fingers. A house that breathes. A woman whose mouth blooms flowers when she cries. I love how poetry bends logic, how it lets the beautiful and the bizarre sit side-by-side without apology. It teaches us how to see differently — and how to feel with our eyes.

People often ask why I don’t write straightforward thrillers or romances or something with a clear beginning, middle, and end — and I never quite know what to say. I suppose it’s because I’m most interested in the questions that don’t have neat answers. What happens when we forget what it means to be human? What might we do to survive — and is that still survival? What haunts us more: what’s happened, or what could happen?

And I’ve always loved questions more than answers. The kind that open doors in your mind rather than shut them. Philosophy doesn’t aim to solve — not really — but to wonder. To dig. To invite us to live in uncertainty without fear. I find that beautiful. There’s something deeply honest in writing stories that leave space for readers to carry the questions away with them, like stones in their pockets.

Much of this started with my childhood. I grew up feeling like almost anything could be sentient. I felt pity for a stone, alone at the bottom of a pond. I was sure the ivy on the wall might be listening. Or when I heard a bird singing, I couldn’t help but wonder — was it hunger, or happiness? I always felt there was something else just beyond the edge of things — not necessarily malicious, but not safe either. And as I got older, I realised that uncertainty — that tingling between fear and awe — was the root of wonder.

That wonder is what I try to bottle in my work. Sometimes it’s found in a decaying suburb. Sometimes in a carefully pruned plant. Sometimes in the way someone whispers a name like it’s a secret. I love the beautiful moments that make you ache a little, like hearing a lullaby from another room.

The strange isn’t always sinister. The quiet isn’t always gentle. And the beautiful can sometimes sting. But that’s the territory I find myself returning to, again and again.

Because I think that’s where the real stories live.