The stories in this collection emerged, as most stories do, from a solitary space- one that every writer needs in order to let her creations come to life. Ironically, it is through that aloneness that the plural voices of the imagination spring into acoustic prominence. One might even say that in the thick silence of dawn, as a writer prepares to enter an as yet unknown world, the stories are fine-tuning their strings, producing a din (melodious or otherwise), somewhere inside the self’s system. With a book like Wildlife on Coal Island that internal noise was especially complex since the characters that inhabit this fictional island are many and diverse. So it transpired that working on this collection was a paradoxical experience, at once deeply reclusive and active where the characters’ dictation could only come into being in physical quietude.