As a kid I watched movies like Alien, Independence Day, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and the series V. A familiar episode of the Twilight Zone comes to mind where the aliens have a book called “How to Serve Man…” which turned out to be a cookbook. These movies always portrayed the extra-terrestrials as violent, and insidious; the earthlings as benign victims of the universe, invaded by outside forces.… Perhaps it was the age of Cold War and the space race…. I can’t tell…but the story was always consistent….

”Danger Will Robinson!”

So, I wanted to turn that narrative on its head. Perhaps, the aliens were harmless, and the humans were the invaders of the universe…? And while I have no evidence to the contrary of whether the extra-terrestrials are or are not malignant…given Earthly human history of wars and oppression, I have plenty of evidence to support this claim on my own planet…. The sad stories of Brady, Minnie and Buddy, Miss Essie et al featured in this book are fiction but their stories are not unusual…ripped from the headlines and all too familiar.

So I created Verbena…a Powder-esque heroine forced to live in a world of all those things I/she/we cannot explain…suicide, avarice, indifference, senselessness, disappointment, cruelty, jealousy, destruction, disease, and loneliness et al…that happen on Earth.