This week’s story, “Calm Sea and Hard Faring,” is the fourth story you’ve written featuring a protagonist named Lilian Pang. Lilian is a fictional character, but some biographical details in her life overlap with yours. Do you view the stories as a sequence? Is Lilian a character you understand in the way you might understand yourself, or does she reveal herself to you as you write?

These stories were written over a period of eighteen months, after our younger son, James, died. The overlapping biographical details between Lilian’s life and mine mean that I know Lilian well enough, so there is less writing to figure out who she is, as I usually do in fiction. In the first three stories, Lilian, as a bereaved mother, goes through life in an altered state, with encounters that increase her sense of introspection. Her situation is like a mirror that reflects the world and reveals other characters to her (and to me). In those stories, Lilian articulates her impressions and thoughts in a way that I might not have been able to articulate had I not taken her up as a protagonist.

I have a feeling that this may be the last of the Lilian sequence, at least for now. In this story, she actively goes back to her memories and confronts a question that she has not asked in the first three stories: How does one, in an outlier situation in human experience, remain enchanted with life?

In this story, Lilian recalls a field trip that her younger son, Jude, took in fourth grade, when the Pang family was living in Northern California. Lilian, alongside six other parents, was a chaperon to the forty children on the five-day trip. Did she realize what she was getting into when she volunteered for this task?

Parent volunteers go on these field trips, I often think, with the best hopes and the worst fears, but hope is, in general, less ineffable than fear: the children will have a safe trip, eat healthily, have a good time, and gather some happy memories. “What could go wrong?” the story asks at one point. “The answer to the question was bound to be: something, or everything. Never: nothing.” Lilian did not realize what she was getting into, though she (and some of the other parents) would not be entirely surprised.

Both of Lilian’s sons have died since that trip, and she is looking back on it with the knowledge of what is to come. Did you ever think of setting the story solely in 2015, without Lilian’s future perspective, or would that have been an impossible undertaking?

If I were to set the story entirely in 2015, the story might retain part of its current shape—a field trip full of conflicts among the children and, more subtly, among the adults. It would have been a simpler, funnier, more dramatic story. But the knowledge of the deaths makes that version of the story less complete. Sometimes a story happens twice: the first time in the real time of the present, the second time in retrospect.

On the field trip, Lilian starts to think of what might happen to all the children when they grow up. She can see how some will become versions of the adults she’s with. But for others—her own son, his friend Evan, a girl called Hazel—she’s unsure what will come. She asks herself, “Was there ever a calm sea for children who could not or would not be molded into an acceptable shape, who did not fit nicely into the safe and inclusive part of the bell curve? Do outlier children meet outlier fates?” Do all those who occupy that outlier status realize that they do? How hard a question is that for a parent to ask?

I think some of those children feel that acutely—Hazel, for instance, and Lilian’s older son, Oscar, whom Lilian compares to Hazel at one point. Others may take some time to fully realize the situation—Jude and Evan in the story are still “comfortable with being the oddballs that they were.” In either case, there is a loneliness innate to the situation of being an outlier. “Do outlier children meet outlier fates?” may be one of the most difficult and unanswerable questions any parent could ask.

Lilian thinks about a line from a Rebecca West novel, “The Fountain Overflows”: “If there is a wall between the present and the future it is not for us to pull down.” But she observes that just about everyone wants somehow to see through that wall, or to demolish it. Should we resist that urge?

I suppose very few people can resist that urge to see through the walls, somewhat, or to pull that wall down. It’s in our human nature to want to have some access to, or control over, the future, which seems to me a fertile ground for much of literature. The antithesis of that urge would be the sentiment of “living in the moment.” But, as Lilian ponders in the story, “Few parents can follow the hackneyed wisdom of living in the moment. All parents battle that wall, nearly always in vain.”

Works by Goethe and Mendelssohn inspire the “calm sea” of the story’s title, and “hard faring” is suggested by a quote from “The Bakkhai” that a friend of Lilian’s older son sends her after his death. Did you have all these pieces—and a title—in mind before you started writing, or did they come to you as you were working?

I was working on the story for a while before those themes surfaced. After reading the excerpt of my recent memoir, “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” in the magazine, the best friend of our older son, Vincent, sent a quote from “The Bakkhai”: “Farewell to you, unhappy child. Fare well, but you shall find your faring hard.” I found the quote poignant, and it sent me to listen to Mendelssohn’s overture and to reread Goethe’s two poems, “Calm Sea” and “The Prosperous Voyage.”

The story, of course, has a deep vein of sadness and melancholy running through it. But there’s real happiness there, too, particularly in the depiction of the friendship between Jude and Evan. Can Lilian hold on to that?

In my experience, sadness and melancholy exist side by side with happiness and joy. (Sometimes I feel that I have to make a distinction between unhappiness and sadness, explaining to people that I am sad but not unhappy.) Lilian’s witnessing of the friendship between Jude and Evan and, later, remembering it, and her time spent sitting next to Hamlet’s castle and watching the swallows with Jude and, later, remembering it, are experiences to hold on to—and I suppose they point to some of the answers to the question of how to stay enchanted in a difficult life. As she says in the story, “There were moments in life that one could hold on to as talismans. They would not insure a calm sea and prosperous voyage; nevertheless, they would make some tempests less daunting, some battles less futile, and some pains less overwhelming.” ♦