Editorial Assistant Anastasios Mihalopoulos' Interview with 2025 Fiction Contest winner Ariadne Asho whose story "Faultline" was published in Issue 306 (Winter 2026)
Anastasios Mihalopoulos: I was taken by the many forms of fracture and faultlines present in this story. Between that of child and parent, mother and father, past and present, home and travel. I was particularly interested by the friction related to school and imagination as you write:
The schools, Aoife’s mother said, were full of technocrats. They were dens of lice and pollution, of something called polarization. In those schools they wanted desperately to cleave children of their imaginations; to remove them from the natural world.
Privately, Aoife missed school.
This moment, occurring early on in the story, establishes the first sense of dispute between parent and child and further grounds the ongoing conflict of their move. Further, “Faultline” employs many striking domestic images and metaphors which inevitably become charged by this moment as we learn that the domestic exists as a kind of antagonist for Aoife. How do you see these material metaphors aiding in the exploration of emotional or familial landscapes in your work?
Ariadne Asho: I’d like to push against the idea that the domestic exists as an antagonist for Aoife. I think domesticity is rather something she yearns for but from which she feels distanced. Perhaps it is more apparent towards the end of the story, when the narrator describes the care with which Aoife has constructed her dollhouse, but it also comes up in the scene you referred to, where she reflects on her experience at school, prior to the "unschooling." There is heartache and longing embedded in the distance between Aoife (and indeed her whole family) and a vision of home life, and to me this is the emotional core of the story. At its heart, Faultline illuminates the fissures between parent and child, between different ideas of home, between hopelessness and dread. The houses propped up on steel beams and cinder blocks in the empty field, the dollhouse in disarray—whether these are metaphors or literal objects and places is perhaps up to the reader more than it is up to me.
AM: A pervasive theme here is the pursuing and abberating of one’s sense of home. Could you talk a little bit about what you think the idea of “home” means to the characters in this story and to you as the author?
AA: The idea of home as a place of universal stability and calm felt somewhat mythical to me as a child. There was always this sense of being on the outside looking in. With Aoife I wanted to create a character who shared this experience, this cycle of fantasy and collapse related to home. Aoife is a child who can’t trust the adults in her life to look after her, who comes to realize that even her internal sense of security is shakable. Her precarity is as physical as it is emotional, and her feeling of isolation from family, from safety, from home, was the charge that drove this story forward as I wrote it.
AM: To go back to Aoife, you build such a striking character in a relatively short amount of page space. The third person narration is close to Aoife’s perspective and depicts well the inner workings of a young mind questioning authority and building a sense of the world around her. Was it difficult to write from the perspective a younger individual? Did you find advantages or levity in what you were able to access when doing so?
AA: For me the hardest characters to write are the ones most like me, or closest to my own point of view. So it was in many ways a relief to write a younger character. It’s a good limitation to have: to consider what it is like to see the world from half the height at which I do now, what knowledge and understanding of the world a child this age would or wouldn’t have. Levity, I’m not so sure. Perhaps there’s more tragedy to being in a situation like Aoife’s as a child—less freedom, less understanding of whether what you’re experiencing is normal, or acceptable, or within your control.
AM: The dollhouse passage suggests cycles of construction and collapse. It captures so aptly the way we turn to imagination in times of turmoil. In the excerpt below we see a premonition of the shaking and rattling of self that is to come at the story’s conclusion.
Then she gripped the dollhouse firmly, and hard as she could — she shook. She shook until something within her was expelled, an equilibrium restored.
I’m curious about whether or not you have a broader interest in cyclical or recursive narrative logics such as this? Does this theme recur often in your other works, including your short story collection cuandrrently in-progress?
AA: Recursion is something I’m often drawn to in stories, both as a writer and as a reader. I love writing that works at multiple scales, and that doesn’t necessarily have a linear narrative. In my short story collection, which is currently in progress, scale, conceit, and repetition are all elements that I am considering carefully as I knit each piece with one another to form a larger narrative. The collection, broadly and conceptually speaking, is about tides, and as such will certainly require a sense of cyclical logic.
AM:Lastly, I wanted to applaud your use of sensory detail. There are so many moments of rich lyricism throughout this piece from the faint hum of the Earth to the chorus of frog song. It led me to question how the role of place factored into the construction of this story and what it says about characters/narrators who notice these details. I wondered if these homes and locales are derivative of personal experiences and how you decided to invoke a sense of place or the lack thereof for this story.
AA: Being a child in an unstable environment certainly makes a person more perceptive to minor details others may overlook, both tangible changes in the environment and tiny emotional shifts. In "Faultline," Aoife collects, categorizes, observes, endures. It’s a symptom of her powerlessness, but also the source of her strength. There is much solitude in moving through the world in this way, and this is one of the forces that distances her from others throughout the story.
As far as the locales being derivative of personal experience: "Faultline" is set in coastal British Columbia, where I grew up. My love of and connection to this place comes up often in my writing, though I did want to invoke in equal parts a sense of placelessness as Aoife and her family find themselves in a liminal setting: a barren field of hard-packed mud that seems as though it could be anywhere.
— Ariadne Asho grew up on Vancouver Island and now lives in Montreal. Her work has appeared in The New Quarterly, and her stories were longlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize twice, in 2023 and 2025. She is currently working on a collection of short fiction.
You can read Ariadne Asho's story "Faultline" in Issue 306 (Winter 2026). Order the issue now!
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