Gina Nutt: The landscape in “Protozoa” sets the stage for a beautiful, yet bittersweet, adventure. What inspired you to write into this environment?
Josh Boardman: My dad used to take the whole family out on these multiday backcountry hikes where we would stay off the grid and eat canned food and fish and cook over the fire. There was also Boy Scouts. I’m not sure I enjoyed it so much when I was younger (I definitely didn’t enjoy fishing, it’s too brutal for me) but now that I’m older I find myself pining after the woods. I think when you pay attention to what’s around you as I am always forced to while in the woods you find that the world is beautiful and terrible. I think it’s a natural consequence of paying attention.

GN: How do you approach writing shorter fiction? What do you enjoy most about the brief form?
JB: I don’t know why I wrote it that way. I don’t enjoy writing short fiction. Sometimes I will use the form to work out some specific feeling or contradiction I’m experiencing that doesn’t end up being that complicated. I’ve got all these short pieces lying around because of that. Maybe I was just following directions? I wrote this one during one of Chelsea Hodson’s writing workshops. The one where I met my wife. I am much happier when I can fold all those little things into the big thing somehow. I prefer booklength writing. There’s enough room there to think something through. Short prose requires mystery and ellipsis because of its shortness. I like a good mystery as much as the next person but in my work I strive for completeness.

GN: I especially admire how swiftly this story layers love, geology, and a broader reverence for nature and humanity. How did you streamline these elements?
JB: On the one hand, my process of writing is recording in as close detail as possible all the sense impressions and thoughts that make up an experience. So while I’m writing I’m not thinking about theme. On the other hand, when I read over a piece that’s already been written I’m trying to experience it as if for the first time (as if it had been written by somebody else) then trying to make sense of the themes I find. So I try to make things cohere. I especially like to make things cohere that don’t seem naturally coherent. But I’ve found love and rocks actually have a lot in common.

GN: What’s in your creative mosaic? Books, music, restaurants, films, visual art, fashion, ephemera, architecture, anything that energizes your writing.
JB: Dasha and I have a very young son (Teddy) to whom we’re reading Neruda’s Odes to Common Things. I remember listening to Silversun Pickups’s Carnavas while I wrote this. Dislocation—travel, museum shows, change in general—produces my best writing. I hate that of course. I remember my mom telling me once how she noticed I’m not very good at change. Who’s good at dealing with change?? I’ve always wished I didn’t have to be an artist because of this. I just don’t know what else to do. Lately I’ve liked watching birds.