There was a story in my family about an aunt with Alzheimer’s. When my mom visited, the aunt would ask after Mom’s parents, who had been dead for years. Upon learning this, she would experience the grief anew and become despondent. But then the memory of the conversation would leave her and, a few minutes minutes later, she’d ask after Mom’s parents again. Mom quickly learnt to answer “They’re doing just fine.”

Papa Bear started as a question: what if the long dead thing in this situation wasn’t a person, but rather was civilization itself? How would that affect someone? How would it affect the people who loved them? How would they even survive? At the time I wrote this, some relatives were having trouble living on their own, and I was struck not just by the changes in them but in the emotional and physical toll it took on the people who were helping them out. So I wanted to focus the drama of the story on that sort of relationship: someone who loved Papa Bear dearly but was completely drained from having to take care of him. Everything else in the narrative flowed from that.

The details of the apocalypse are left intentionally vague. The main drama is the interpersonal relationship; the end of the world is just background noise. I liked the idea of coldness as an ever-present threat because it mirrored the idea of hibernation (the title character’s name is ‘Bear’ after all). Apocalypse dramas in the past few years have taken a turn towards romanticism, where the survivors live in a broad, open, untamed land. It feels to me like a strange sort of wish-fulfilment fantasy where the villain is the very idea of modernity. I wanted to avoid that, so I opted for a bleaker landscape that would kill you if you stayed outside long enough. The biggest technical challenge for me was finding a way to let snippets of the world-building leak through — enough for the reader to piece things together — but not so much as to undermine Papa Bear’s sense of confusion.