Kath McStay asked Kate Heartfield:

What inspired the story Chameleon?

Kate Heartfield Thank you for the question! The story is here for those who haven't read it:

I wrote it as an entry in a flash-fiction contest in a writers' group. The prompt was "make a cruel action into a kindness, or vice versa." For some reason, I thought about people who don't make space for others on buses, and thought about how I could turn a person claiming a seat with their backpack into a secretly kind action.

On a deeper level, it hearkens back to my own teenagehood, when I used to take buses through rural Manitoba and northern Ontario, and a long Greyhound bus ride I took from Winnipeg to Houston when I was 17. That was a whole education in a few days! I was thinking more generally about the ways in which women and girls get away from their lives when they need to, how they find safety or freedom. And I suppose I was thinking about the ways that we use our outward appearance to signal our identities to each other and the world, the meanings of a t-shirt or a hair colour, and how for some people those can be a kind of language telling you where you're safe and where you aren't.

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