In Jaclyn Desforges’s aptly titled short story collection, Weird Babies (The Porcupine’s Quill, April 2026), we meet a wide cast of characters that include a ghost, a tarantula caretaker, a mother with five unexplained and well-behaved babies, and telepathic moth people on a distant planet. Each piece in this thirteen-story collection is poetic and haunting, containing beautiful passages that depict mothers and children and babies in the broadest sense, while moths, ostriches, iguanas, miniature men, and other assorted creatures populate these charmingly odd and poignant stories. The collection is bookended by two pieces tied to CRAFT: “Wet,” finalist for the CRAFT 2023 Short Fiction Prize and published in November 2023, and “Mothworld,” shortlisted for the CRAFT 2024 Novelette Print Prize.

What I found particularly compelling is the way in which these stories are written. We’re so close to the narrator that it creates a kind of POV tunnel vision, while repeating refrains in the prose can be almost meditative or, as Desforges describes, “hypnotic.” Furthermore, time can be fluid in these stories, which are told almost insistently in present tense, allowing readers to form a synergy with the narrator and experience each story as though it were unfolding in real time. It was a pleasure to delve into these characters’ lives, get lost in the stories’ twists and turns and loop-de-loops, and find my way to each unexpected yet satisfying end.

—Rowena Leong Singer

 

Rowena Leong Singer: In many of the stories in this collection, we’re very close to the narrator, so close that we sometimes can’t see anything beyond what the narrator is focused on, a sort of POV tunnel vision. What led to you starting your stories in this way?

Jaclyn Desforges: This is such a great question. And pulling the thread of this question inevitably leads me back to being that weird kid sitting in the grass at recess, staring at a potato bug until someone waves their hands in front of my face and tries to pull me back to Earth.

What led to me starting these stories in this way is that I think every single one of these characters is me, a different aspect of me. Even the terrible father in “Dust” or the shit-talking hamster in “Ghost” or the swirling black void in “Mothworld” that follows the main character around, arranging objects by color and size, driving her crazy. And perhaps what is at the core of me is that kind of tunnel vision, that kind of powerful and sometimes oppressive attention—so of course it would find its way into my characters.

On the craft level, I don’t want to write something that just sounds like fiction. I want to go back to core principles, to the actual purpose of narrative writing, which I believe is to transmit the experience of consciousness to the body of the reader. Which sounds obvious, but it’s also tricky—it forces me to pay very close attention to my experience of being human. I don’t have a voice in my head neatly narrating my day. I experience thoughts and images and ideas and anxieties all in a jumble. So that’s what I try to create on the page.

I’m interested in writing intensity and obsession. I like writing limerence—so many characters in Weird Babies are in strange, limerent relationships with people who aren’t good for them—and limerence definitely has a tunnel vision quality to it. I also think I’ve always been more interested in inner worlds than the outer one.

 

RLS: Stylistically, these stories often contain a repeating phrase, like a refrain, sometimes using the character’s name. This is particularly notable in the story “Yes, And.” There’s something almost meditative about the repeated use of names and phrases. How did this writing style come about?

JD: I started out as a poet and I still think of myself as a poet who writes fiction. Repetition has a hypnotic quality to it that I really like, musically—it feels like an incantation. When it’s done well, it also creates momentum, and so much of writing fiction is about creating momentum. You want the reader to be swept along. I have to be ruthless with myself, though. My poetry teacher, Ian Williams, told me to only use repetition when it’s truly intentional. When I’m freewriting, I’ll use it a lot, and I cut it back, back, back. (There. I did it again.)

I’m autistic and my kid is autistic, and I think it’s so fascinating, in autistic bodies and autistic culture, the way the pleasure of repetition is woven into the way we experience the world. The repetition of actions, the repetition of sounds, listening to the same song in the car over and over again.

Repetition creates music, it grounds us, it soothes us. I find that repetition can also provide cohesion and coherence in stories that might otherwise go off the rails. In “Yes, And,” it’s unclear what is actually happening in real life and what is only happening in Quail’s imagination—I wanted to give equal weight to each. Quail is secretly in love with her best friend and also secretly in love with her best friend’s fiancé and also secretly in love with no one. And the past and the present happen at once, and what doesn’t happen happens along with what does. It’s a lot. But the music of it, I hope, carries the whole thing along, and even if the reader doesn’t necessarily know what has physically happened in the story, they come away knowing what it feels like to be Quail.

What I hope I’m gesturing toward is the way in which we co-create ourselves with the world around us. Events happen out there, in the physical, and they also happen inside us, in our imaginations, and both affect us—they affect who we become.

 

RLS: I was fascinated by the number of atypical animals that appear in these short stories, such as tarantulas, ostriches, iguanas, moths, and so forth. Sometimes, as in “Mothworld,” they play a central role in conveying the story. In fact, one of my favorite parts of that story is the fantastic “moth-centric” questions that the main character, Sorrow, is asked in the “get to know you” moment with an inhabitant of the moth planet. What drew you to these particular animals? And how did they end up creeping or crawling into your stories?

JD: When I’m leading writing workshops, I’ll often ask participants to make a list of animals they love and also a list of animals that freak them out a bit. These lists always end up being very symbolic, especially the freaky list. When I’m writing, I’m always looking for portals to emotional resonance, and animals have never let me down. Writing about animals—especially the ones that scare me—helps me connect not only with that creature, but with the part of myself that is uncomfortable with whatever that creature represents.

For example: Opossums used to really freak me out. They’re ancient—they run on early mammalian technology, birthing tiny babies (thirteen to a teaspoon; only a few survive). They’re weirdly pointy. They’re scavengers. It wasn’t until I started researching them and writing about them that I realized opossums represented my own fears around motherhood and the terror of trying to keep another being alive. Ostriches freak me out because they have tiny brains and huge, strong bodies. They have the power to destroy and also very little understanding of their own power (and I’m just now realizing how symbolic they are of the terrible father in my story “Dust.”)

I’m also interested in the ways in which story structures are always rooted in nature, whether we’re talking about the male-orgasm-centred rising action/climax model or something more experimental. In “The Gall,” I used the (rather horrifying) mating habits of the fig wasp as the structure and also as the inspiration for the story itself. Nature is everything; it is what is inside us and what is outside us, and it is the greatest writing teacher I have ever had. 

 

RLS: For the most part, the stories are written in present tense. Was this a conscious choice? Why or why not? What do you find appealing about writing in the present tense?

JD: I prefer the music of present tense. Maybe this comes from my background as a poet, but I want to remove as much distance between the reader and the story as I can. On a practical level, many of my stories weave between the past and the present, so I like the way present tense makes it clear where we are right now—it makes the narrative present very obvious. Writing the narrative present in present tense means I don’t have to lean heavily on the word had in my flashbacks. Something I love about fiction is the delicate balance between artistic sensibility and the importance of clear communication. Even when I’m experimenting, I never want my readers to be confused.

 

RLS: At what point did you determine the theme (and title) for your collection? Did it start with a particular story or current events or a shift in perspective?

JD: It didn’t happen until the very end. The book was written. I gave it to Miranda Hill, author of Sleeping Funny, my brilliant mentor and friend. She read it. We drank wine. As we were sitting there in the restaurant, I kept referring to one of the stories in the collection, “Wet,” as the weird babies story. Because it’s about a gaggle of weird babies—there’s this woman who has five unexplained babies in her possession, and it’s never explained why, and they’re mysterious. They don’t act like normal babies. They’re quiet. They sit neatly in a row. And Miranda said, “You know that’s your title, right? Your book title.”

I ran home after that dinner and wrote the back cover copy. Because I suddenly realized the entire book was about weird babies—yes, there are literal babies in the book, strange ones, but it’s also about vulnerability, and softness, and terror, and aloneness, and all the feelings a person feels when a part of them has been abandoned or unparented or unloved. And trying to get those needs met in the context of unusual obsessions and romantic relationships. Until that moment, I was afraid my collection was a mix of very different stories without a clear through line. I was afraid I had spent five years writing this book and it was disconnected. But of course it was connected.

I think some people do start out with an idea for a story collection that is already knitted together—the same with poetry collections—but I’ve never been that kind of writer. The story appears in my subconscious and I write it down. I don’t have much control. If I try to control things, the story doesn’t feel alive. I have to tend to it, to care for it, but I can’t force it to become something it’s not.

 

RLS: I love how your stories range from bordering on speculative fiction to full speculative fiction. What do you find fascinating in utilizing speculative fiction in your stories? How has this enabled you to convey the stories you’re trying to tell?

JD: The literary arts in general are so fascinating because we’re working in words, and words can only gesture toward what’s real. When I’m working with students, I encourage them to use concrete nouns as much as possible. We’re casting a spell. We’re creating in the imaginal realm, we’re working in the immaterial, and the easiest way to do that is to call up memories of matter. Rocks. Driftwood. Blood. I tell students that concrete nouns travel directly to the body of the reader, while concept words move from brain to brain. They skip the heart and gut.

The exciting thing about speculative fiction for me is that it allows us to concretize the conceptual. In “Mothworld,” I could write that Sorrow carries her trauma everywhere she goes, it’s always with her, nagging at her, making her feel bad and ashamed and afraid. But that wouldn’t have the same effect as describing her roommate, the swirling black void, slamming the cupboard doors and chopping up vegetables for a frittata while Sorrow’s trying to schmooze at a work party.

It’s wild to me that by writing about what’s absolutely not real—talking hamsters, telepathic moth people—we’re able to gesture towards what is real in a way that is concrete and grounded rather than conceptual.

 

RLS: Is there anything else you’d like to add that I may not have asked?

JD: Once upon a time, my poetry teacher, Ian Williams, nudged me toward writing fiction. I felt so afraid to try it—I was just beginning to gain confidence as a poet, and I had no idea how to move from making poems toward making stories. But I quickly learned that a short story has more in common with a poem than it does with a novel. My advice for poets who are considering writing short fiction is to lean into images. Humans can’t help but make meaning, so when you line images up, the connections will appear. You can trust your subconscious mind, you can trust that the ideas that pop up have metaphorical resonance whether you understand them yet or not.

So much of writing involves trusting yourself—trusting your imagination, trusting your sense of the world. Believing that your ideas are worthy of being written down. I feel so lucky to be on this path, that I get to do this work. To encourage others to do this work.

 

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JACLYN DESFORGES is the queer and neurodivergent author of a short story collection called Weird Babies (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2026), a poetry collection called Danger Flower (Anstruther Books, 2021), and a picture book called Why Are You So Quiet? (Annick Press, 2020). She’s currently writing her first novel, Eyelash Person, with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts. A Bread Loaf alumna and RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award Winner, Jaclyn’s writing has appeared in CRAFT, The Fiddlehead, Room, and other magazines across North America. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best American Short Fiction & Fantasy, as well as Best American Short Stories, and she was a finalist for the 2023 CBC Poetry Prize. Jaclyn’s poetry collection travelled to the moon in 2025 as part of the New York Times-featured Lunar Codex Project. She teaches creative writing at Wilfrid Laurier University and lives in Hamilton, Ontario.

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ROWENA LEONG SINGER is a San Francisco Bay Area writer whose work appears in The New York Times, North American Review, Black Warrior Review, Narrative, and elsewhere. She is a semifinalist for the Books Like Us First Novel Contest by Simon & Schuster, a grand prize winner in literary fiction for the Book Pipeline Unpublished Contest, and a semifinalist for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship Contest. She received her MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She is a director of Rooted & Written, a member of The Writers Grotto, and hard at work on her second novel. You can find her on Instagram @rowenaleongsinger.