What if famous heroes of the past suddenly transformed into unstable, unsettling, and endlessly surprising characters? In this mind-bending Why Authors Write episode, host Sara Stanton speaks with Senaa Ahmad about her debut short story collection, The Age of Calamities. Senaa unpacks the personal history that inspired her to fuse historical figures, speculative fiction, metafiction, and inspired chaos into an unleashed-brain collection of singular encounters. Ahmad begins by charting her path to writing: she grew up in a family of passionate readers, surrounded by storytellers who always had their “noses stuck in a book.” Writing felt like a natural extension of that environment. As a kid, she and her siblings wrote constantly and secretly read each other’s drafts over their shoulders—a kind of spontaneous, communal creativity that, in hindsight, shaped her understanding of stories as shared experiences. A key origin point for the history element in The Age of Calamities was her family’s old, outdated encyclopedia set—20–30 years behind the times, still treating the moon landing as recent and the USSR as fully intact. Reading these volumes as a child, Ahmad sensed that history is always mediated, partial, and strangely frozen. This became central to why she wrote these stories: she wanted to explore historical figures at the moment when they stop being people and become ideas, metaphors, and cultural shorthand. Her project: to “tug on” those ideas—sometimes leaning into them, sometimes subverting them—by dropping these figures into speculative or uncanny environments. Throughout the episode, Sara pulls out examples from specific stories—like “Inside the House of the Historian,” with its murder-mystery dollhouse mansion full of historical figures, and “The Wolves,” which entwines Genghis Khan, fairy-tale horror, survival, and time-bending narration. In “The Wolves,” Ahmad wanted to approach a “monster story” through the lens of a conqueror whose historical devastation is almost unimaginable. She connects this to a recurring obsession: survival—how people live through, and live after, catastrophic events. Ahmad also discusses her craft and process. She began keeping a story log, a kind of diary for each piece, tracking process, ideas, and shifts.Before drafting, she now writes extensive notes—about world, character, and possibilities—so she’s never jumping into a truly blank page.She developed a ritual of reading poetry before writing, which sharpens her sensitivity to language at a “molecular level” and replenishes creative energy.She lets stories expand too far—sometimes ballooning to 15,000 words—before distilling them down into their final, concentrated form. While she doesn’t frame it as direct “advice,” her reflections hold powerful guidance for other authors: Embrace formal and conceptual risk. Metafiction, second person, structural experiments—these are tools, not gimmicks.Honor the long timeline. Stories may take years, with multiple false starts and radical rewrites.Interrogate history. Ask who’s telling the story, for whom, and to what end.Build sustaining rituals. Whether it’s reading poetry, keeping a story log, or drafting expansive versions first, process is what carries you through difficult projects.
