Name: Dawn Vogel
Age: Mid-30s
Author of: “Donning the Helm”
Current Geographic Location: Seattle, Washington
Original Hometown: St. Louis, Missouri
Twitter: @historyneverwas
Website: http://historythatneverwas.com
Recent publications: “Unexpected Sparx,” in Cobalt City Dark Carnival (Timid Pirate Publishing), “The Glorious Dead” in Zombies Gone Wild Vol. 2 (forthcoming)
Do you think alien life exists in the Universe? I think that for humans to assume that they are the only intelligent life form in the entire universe is a little bit egocentric. So yes, I do believe in aliens.
If you could travel off Earth, would you? What if it meant you could never come back? I think that I would want to IF I could come back, for the experience of seeing the Earth from space. But if it meant I couldn’t come back, I’d be much less inclined to go.
What inspired your story? I didn’t start out with much of an idea for this story except that I knew I wanted to set it in the nineteenth century and use a journal format. I also borrowed from an Eddie Izzard bit from Glorious about how archaeologists always find a series of small walls. So I started with a series of small walls that made up a labyrinth, and the story just grew from there.
What music or movies helped you to write this essay? I wrote portions of this story while listening to an eclectic mix of instrumental music, mostly from movie soundtracks. But I quickly found that the Requiem for a Dream soundtrack really didn’t contribute well to this sort of story. The Star Wars trilogy soundtracks were a little better. In the end, I probably wrote more of this story in silence than I normally do.
How many rewrites did you do before submitting? I wrote the bulk of this story by hand, so there were some minor rewrites as I typed it. I also edited it a bit and got some suggestions for edits from my husband. I think the portion that I worked on the most was the letter at the beginning of the story, while the journal just flowed out smoothly.
What is your favorite bit?
“On reviewing what I have written, I know that this sounds like nothing more than a strange dream. For years, religious men, the mentally ill, and others of dubious emotional clarity have claimed to see flying discs in the sky, which they attribute to the workings of God and the saints or beings from another world. I have always deemed such sightings to be folly.”
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