What if you had access to a portal where everything you put inside could instantly be fixed — just like that? Broken furniture, a cracked picture frame — you throw it in the portal, and it’s magically made just better. What would happen if you jumped in?

This is just one of many supernatural phenomenons found in the book, “Sinkhole and Other Inexplicable Voids” — a new short story collection from Spokane author Leyna Krow. Set in the Pacific Northwest, her characters explore what it means to be a good mother, daughter, sister or wife, in a changing world that tends to only get stranger. These characters wrestle with the real threats of climate change in the region, through a lens of magical realism, humor and heart.

“Sinkhole” is in bookstores now, and you can see Krow in person for an event at Powell’s Books in Portland, February 24th.

Krow spoke with OPB’s “All Things Considered” producer Donald Orr.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Donald Orr: So you live in Spokane, Washington, and a lot of the stories in “Sinkhole” are close to home. They’re set right here in the Pacific Northwest. Places like Mount Rainier, the Oregon coast cities all up and down I-5. What is it about the Northwest and the aura of the region that draws you in as a writer?

Leyna Krow: I’m not somebody who necessarily subscribes to the notion that somebody has to write what they know, but the Northwest is what I know. This is home. It has been for a long time, but it’s also a region that I think is really fascinating. It’s unique in its geography and its culture. Spokane in particular, being the largest city on the east side of the Cascades by a wide margin that’s surrounded by a pretty rural area — is just so fascinating culturally and so strange. This is a strange place and it’s fun to write about.

Orr: In one of the opening sequences of a story in the book, a character says, “Hey, let’s get weird with it.” Is that the kind of approach you take when you’re drafting new stories?

Krow: Absolutely. There’s this desire on my part, I think, to see where I can push the envelope. How strange can it get before it takes over the story and the narrative gets lost? Where’s that boundary at? There’s some straight realism in the collection, but that’s never where my heart lies. I want the weird.

Orr: In the book, you wrestle with more serious topics: wildfires, heat waves, climate disasters that are very much rooted in the real world, rooted here in the Northwest. But in your writing, how does magic and the fantastical help you, or help your characters, cope with climate change?

Krow: I’ve always seen that genre as sort of like a fractured lens, that actually makes it easier to look at real things. Because by filtering the real through the unreal, we can take a step back and say, ‘Oh, I’m not so personally invested in this. This isn’t true.’ And then it actually makes us, I think, more willing to look closely at things. Some of what’s happening in the book are real things about climate change and some things are fantastical. Some things are sort of a fusion of the two, and it’s my hope that the unreality, the magic of it gives readers both a break from the horrors of climate change that we’re all always thinking about now. But also lets us look at it in a truthful way without necessarily having to look at it dead on.

Orr: Reading your stories, you do a really great job of letting your sense of humor come into the picture. How important is it to just find the whimsical to offset that horror?

Krow: For me, it’s pretty darn important. I think first and foremost, I’m always entertaining myself in my own writing, and so if I don’t think something is fun or funny, at least a little bit, I’m just not going to be able to access it. That’s an entry point for me as a writer and as a reader, and so I think that a lot of what I’ve written here is definitely dark humor. It’s looking at some pretty dark subjects, but still funny. It’s really just me having a good time where I can.

Orr: Another theme throughout the book is womanhood and motherhood, and all the anxieties that can come with that. You’re a mom yourself with two children. How has your experience as a mother affected your writing?

Krow: Tremendously. I am now a mother of two children, so I think of this book as the book of that period, of early child caring. So much of those stories is infused with that, of the anxiety of parenthood and the questions of what it means to be a good mother, and what it means to be somebody’s child. Every day I’m with my kids and it filters into my work. The joy of that, and also the loneliness of it and the anxiety of it.

Orr: On the other side of that coin, how do you think your writing influences how you parent your kids today as they grow up?

Krow: I do think that there’s a reflective circular quality to it. You have an experience and you think about it and you put it on the page in fiction and it bears out in the story, and then does it go back into my life in some way? Maybe. I do think that writing about parenting does make me more thoughtful about parenting. I’m not sure that it makes me a better parent. I think you kind of are who you are when you’re with your kids, but it is an interesting thing to think about for sure.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/02/02/spokane-author-leyna-krow-new-book-explores-climate-change-motherhood-magic/