Biolume is a family survival novel turned ecological reckoning, in which the discovery of a bioluminescent lifeform sparks a battle over wonder, ownership, and the cost of calling destruction innovation. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

About five or six years ago I was thinking about short film ideas, and I had this one scene I couldn’t stop thinking about, a father and his son trapped in an underground cave system, phone dead, and these blue firefly-looking things land on the phone and charge it. That was it. Just that single scene in my head. The whole story grew outward from that moment.

The setting came next. The Gunnison Canyon felt right because it’s real, it’s remote, and the landscape already makes you feel small. The family grew around the father and son, Ethan, Maya, Jack, and Lucy, because I wanted to explore how different people respond to the same impossible thing. And once the Embers existed as something beautiful and useful, the bigger question arrived on its own, what happens when the world finds out? When the first instinct isn’t to protect something miraculous but to own it? That tension between wonder and extraction felt like one of the defining conflicts of our time, and it gave the story its spine.

Lucy feels authentic and alive on the page. How did you develop her voice without turning her into a symbolic “wise child”?

I wrote Lucy as a kid first and a character second. She doesn’t understand everything that’s happening around her, and she doesn’t need to. What she has is a kind of radical openness, she notices things the adults have trained themselves to filter out. I gave her contradictions, she’s brave but she gets scared, she’s perceptive but she misreads things, she cares deeply but she’s also eleven and sometimes just wants to go home.

I think the “wise child” trap comes from making a kid a mouthpiece for the author’s themes. Lucy isn’t carrying a message. She’s just paying attention in a way the adults have forgotten how to. If she feels real, it’s because I let her be inconsistent and curious rather than wise.

Were the Embers always meant to embody both beauty and threat, or did their political and scientific consequences emerge later in the writing process?

From the very beginning. I never wanted the Embers to be just a plot device or a simple metaphor. They had to be genuinely beautiful, the kind of thing that stops you in your tracks, and at the same time, their existence had to create real consequences.

The beauty is what makes the political and scientific stakes matter. If the Embers were just dangerous, it’s a containment story. If they’re just beautiful, it’s a nature documentary. The tension between those two things, that something can be wondrous and still put people into conflict, is really the engine of the whole book. I wanted readers to feel the same pull the characters feel, you would want to protect this thing, but you also understand why others want to control it.

Biolume seems to ask whether humans can encounter wonder without commodifying it. Did you begin with that question, or did the story lead you there?

The story led me there. I started with a family, a canyon, and a discovery, and the question emerged as the characters had to make choices about what to do with what they’d found. But once I saw it clearly, it became the spine of everything.

I think that’s how the best themes work, they’re not imposed from above, they’re uncovered through the characters and the pressure they’re under. And it’s a question I don’t think the book fully answers, because I’m not sure there is a clean answer. We’re wired to protect what we love and exploit what we find. Sometimes those impulses point at the same thing. I wanted the book to sit honestly inside that tension rather than pretend to resolve it.

It won’t be the last we hear from Lucy.

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