Senaa Ahmad The Age of Calamities

Debut authors: How they did it, what they learned, and why you can do it, too.

- BY MORIAH RICHARD

Senaa Ahmad

The Age of Calamities

(Short speculative fiction, January, Henry Holt & Co.)

"A genre-bending story collection where historical figures are yanked into the modern day, turned into ghosts, embroiled in mysteries, and otherwise taken out of their familiar environments."

WRITES FROM: Toronto.

PRE-CALAMITIES: I thought I was working on my first collection, a mashup of genre and diaspora fiction, featuring teenage cults, ghosts who live in telephone wires, and hijabi whiz kids ... when the idea for The Age of Calamities crept into my head and wouldn't go away.

TIME FRAME: I wrote the stories on and off between 2018 and 2023, including four stories that never made it into the collection. Some, like “Choose Your Own Apocalypse,” took the entire five-year span to write, with big blocks of time in between drafts.

ENTER THE AGENT: I was lucky enough to have a few agents contact me after reading short stories of mine somewhere. One of those agents was Alexa Stark, who read “Let's Play Dead” in The Paris Review and reached out with a lovely note. It took me two more years to approach her and others with a finished-ish draft of the collection.

BIGGEST SURPRISE: It took me such a long time to discover the pleasures of revisions, and I'm surprised at how much I've enjoyed drawing on editors' notes to revise the work.

WHAT I DID RIGHT: I'm keenly aware that the dividing line between a writer who has broken in and who hasn't is more ephemeral than it seems. It helps to separate rejection in the industry from an objective statement on the quality of your work, which feels even truer now that I've sat on juries and panels myself.