Jeff VanderMeer is probably my favorite living writer and I’m hard-pressed to choose favorites from his work, but stories set in the city of Ambergris will always have a soft spot in my heart. (See above, re: my live of strange towns.) ‘Transformation’ builds out aspects of the most important and too-often overlooked part of a fictional city: the arts scene. I read this story for the first time when I was 18 years old and it felt like grabbing lightning; I’ve not been the same since. Jeff has also been a friend to me over the years and while very little of what I write feels like his work, I don’t think I’d be a writer without his example to follow.

First published in Palace Corbie Eight, 1999. Collected in City of Saints and Madmen, Wildside Press, 2001. Listen to it here