I think the most challenging thing about writing an unreliable narrator—and writing in general, really—can be when you're too worried about being misinterpreted. [...] Trust is the crux of it—you have to trust yourself as an artist to effectively share your vision, and you have to trust your reader's intelligence. That takes practice.
What was your main inspiration to write “i always liked blueberries the best”? What sparked the initial idea?
There’s a line in the song Diamonds & Rust by Joan Baez: “Speaking strictly from me/we both could have died then and there.” I think about that line a lot. I don’t know of a single sentence than can explain, more succinctly, how it feels to look back on a situation and realize you’d completely misread how the other person felt. I’ve felt it many times in my life. The last time I felt it, I decided to write this story.
The protagonist in this piece is a bit of an unreliable narrator, to say the least. Do you enjoy writing these types of characters? Did you come up against any difficulties in the writing process while writing a character/narrative through this lens?
Yes, I think every narrator I end up writing is at least somewhat unreliable. It’s very fun to play with bias and uncertainty as storytelling devices.
I think the most challenging thing about writing an unreliable narrator – and writing in general, really – can be when you’re too worried about being misinterpreted. You’ve created an established truth for your world, and then you’re intentionally obscuring that truth through your narrator. It’s almost like you’ve painted a landscape, and then smeared your hand across the canvas, and you have to trust that anyone who reads it can still see the echoes of what that landscape might have looked like. Trust is the crux of it – you have to trust yourself as an artist to effectively share your vision, and you have to trust your reader’s intelligence. That takes practice.
In the story, it’s made clear that the world has been completely ravaged by war and destruction. What drew you to want to explore a story within this type of setting?
I am always very drawn to post-apocalyptic settings, because I like the idea of deconstructing reality to see what’s left, but there’s this episode of The Twilight Zone called “Two” that was of particular inspiration to me. It’s sort of this Cold War Adam & Eve story that I ended up naturally riffing on. I wanted to take the feeling of isolation and turn it up to eleven – total global annihilation. And I think it’s a setting that lends itself well to the main character’s delusion. Unlike “Two”, which is a very political story, the full context of what even happened here is lost because she is so completely absorbed within herself.
What do you hope readers take away from this piece?
Honestly, I’m just looking forward to hearing what people think of it, and I hope it can resonate in some kind of way. I’m much more interested in people telling me what they think, rather than telling them how they should feel.
A couple more questions just for fun! Do you have any particular writing rituals?
I write best when I should be doing something else that is much more important.
Lastly . . . what scares you?
I have never been fond of ET the Extraterrestrial. His long wretched neck.
Zanny Stohl (she/they) is a Connecticut librarian with a long-standing interest in horror, speculative fiction, and all things bizarre. Having only previously been published in a few local magazines, Zanny is excited to share more of their work with the world. In her spare time, she likes art, video games, crochet, Wikipedia rabbit holes, and watching weirdo movies with her cat Velvet.
