The Feral Butterfly follows Sam across childhood and adulthood as she confronts the fear, violence, and buried truths of a rural family history that still holds her in its grip. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

I’ve always felt deeply connected to the Southern countryside in the United States—its beauty, its isolation, and the way it can hold both comfort and unease at the same time. My own life has included periods of hardship, including a difficult marriage that separated me from my family, as well as intense night terrors when I was a child.

In many ways, The Feral Butterfly grew out of the emotional overlap between those experiences. The core of the story has been with me since I was very young, though I can’t fully explain where it originated. It feels less like something I invented and more like something I’ve been trying to understand for a long time, but I assure you, I have never been hunted by a serial killer. 

How did you balance psychological suspense with the quieter, character-driven elements of literary fiction?

The novel is told from the perspective of an eight-year-old, and that naturally shapes both the suspense and the emotional tone. Children don’t have a full understanding of the world around them, so tension emerges from what is felt but not fully explained.

I tried to remain very disciplined about perspective—continually asking myself what Sam would realistically understand, and just as importantly, what she wouldn’t. That gap between experience and comprehension is where much of the psychological suspense lives, while the quieter, character-driven moments come from her attempts to make sense of it all.

Sam feels stubborn, sharp, funny, and deeply watchful as a child. How did you shape her voice so it felt both authentic and unsentimental?

Sam experiences the world viscerally—she feels things in her body before she can articulate them. That idea was influenced in part by my experiences with yoga and training in karate, where you learn to pay attention to physical intuition.

At the same time, I didn’t want her voice to become overly sentimental. In my experience, children don’t always understand what’s happening to them, even if they feel it deeply. Sam reflects that tension.

I also shaped her in contrast to her sister, Sarah, who is softer and more openly emotional. In many ways, they represent two sides of the same inner life. Their differences allowed me to explore emotional complexity without relying on overt explanation—something I tried to highlight in scenes like the one with the baby deer.

The novel handles cruelty with a lot of restraint and very little moral commentary. Was that always your approach, or did it emerge through revision?

That restraint was intentional from the beginning. I believe moral judgment is something the reader should arrive at on their own. Violence and cruelty are part of the human experience, but they’re rarely simple or fully explained.

Rather than guiding the reader toward a specific conclusion, I wanted to present those moments as honestly as possible and allow space for interpretation. For me, that openness creates a more meaningful and lasting engagement with the story.

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