Photograph by Dailey Hubbard

In “Visitor,” your story in this week’s issue, a young man gets a knock on his door a month after his father’s funeral. The visitor claims to be an old friend of the father’s—a former lover, in fact, in Jamaica. What was the genesis, in your mind, of this scenario, besides the fact that it could go in all sorts of directions?

I was wrapping up edits on my first novel, “Memorial,” and there’s a relationship at the crux of that narrative that isn’t entirely dissimilar to this story’s. But a recurring issue for me, while I was writing that book, was figuring out how to establish and ultimately contort the foundations of those characters’ dynamics. So a lot of the stories I wrote at that time, or at least the sketches of those stories, were just me experimenting and trying to figure out what would and wouldn’t make its way into that longer project. Although the thing about that is, for every new narrative, each character gained their own autonomy, so to speak, with their own interests and histories and lives. Which I became invested in. So I wanted to follow through with them, just to see where they’d go.

Another parallel reason would be that, for the past few years, fiction-wise, I’ve been almost exclusively interested in writing narratives that wouldn’t make me feel worse. You could probably say that the mode that I’ve settled on lately, or mostly settled on, falls under the “traumedy” blanket. (A while back, Emily Nussbaum wrote about the genre’s malleability for y’all.) It’s a tricky space to describe tonally, but you know it when you see it. I feel like Helen Oyeyemi, Hiromi Kawakami, Daniel Zomparelli, Nicola Yoon, and Alejandro Zambra are so, so deft with it. And a central component of navigating that space, on my end, has been: How can I paint fully realized lives on the page, navigating a crucial point in their lives, without centering trauma? And what does that look like when all of my characters are from communities that’ve been historically marginalized in this country? What possibilities do we find ourselves with then? What happens when you give all of your characters the benefit of the doubt, and the possibility of joy, even if it’s as fleeting as a meal, and proceed from there? I think there’s a way, in this country’s contemporary literature, where the validity of narratives decentering those traumas are decreed as “less than” or “weightless” or “sentimental”; or those stories get tagged with the admonishment that “nothing happens”—which, if that’s the case, then so fucking what? Because these communities are deserving of light on the page, too.

But for an actual answer to your question: last year, I was listening to a lot of Alton Ellis, and also a lot of Colde. One day, my Spotify account shuffled “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do” and “Wa-R-R” in relatively quick succession, and the story just sort of lodged itself in my head from then onward.

When you first wrote a full version of the story, the narrator’s sexual life happened offstage. In the revision and editing process, you introduced the guy he’s sleeping with, Joel. Why did this feel like an important addition?

Joel was really fun to write! That’s probably the biggest reason—I think he’d be a really chill guy to hang out with. But I also thought it made a better story for there to be real-time repercussions, and a contrast, from the narrator’s relationship to his visitor. The narrator is privy to a warmth from his father’s ex, and the question becomes whether or not, and how, he’ll incorporate that in his own life, and toward the people he cares about. I don’t know that I personally need to see the change a character may or may not undergo in a piece itself, but I thought it’d be cool in this instance.

And, for what it’s worth, in the project that this story’s from, Joel’s got his own narrative thing going on. In the larger scheme of things, it felt good and right to make sure he was included.

Like many of your stories, “The Visitor” is set in a very specific slice of Houston. What distinguishes this part of the city from the neighborhoods you wrote about in “Waugh,” your previous story in the magazine? And what are some of the reasons that Houston is such fertile literary territory for you, besides the fact that you live there?

Houston’s such a confluence of people, places, and ideas, in a relatively closed space, that it has all of the elements for narrative just by way of the geography. The city’s like this enormous fucking bubble, comprised of interconnected, independent bubbles, and also there are too many cars. Each neighborhood is so very much itself, despite Harris County’s expansiveness, that the geography itself is rife with possibility. If comedy’s the combination of several things for an unexpected result, then what does it mean to have a church next to a strip mall next to a strip club next to a charter school next to a Thai takeout spot? What does it mean to live in a city that, in a lot of ways, is very much at the center of climate change’s repercussions in this country? What does it mean to live in a city that is at the outer ends of both religiosity and also decadence? What happens when that city’s the most diverse one in the States, with a rapidly growing population? What does it mean to live in a city that weathers all of those things and is, simultaneously, so low-key about it? And for its residents to, for the most part, find a way to live and break bread and make space for another?

Also—Houstonians are just so fucking funny. Good lord. My bánh mì guy at this diner I live by, and the lady who hooks me up at the jerk-chicken spot, and the older women who drag me (thoughtfully, lovingly) at this spa I go to tell stories so much better than I do. Nearly everyone here is a storyteller of some kind.

Before the visitor goes back to Jamaica, he and the narrator have a last meal. According to the narrator, “The thing on both of our minds hung above us, swaying in the lights.” What is that thing?

Eh. It’s no fun if I tell you.