KMWR: I’d love to hear about how a first draft of this story came about. I’m hoping not from a personal anecdote?

YH: The first draft of this story was inspired by a friend who visited me in Paris and was pickpocketed. I wanted to capture the emotional impact of that incident and write a story where someone gets to fight back. Plus, pickpocketing felt like the perfect action to explore loss and vulnerability, which ties into the protagonist's struggle with hoarding and her attachment to material things.

KMWR: I was moved by the crafting of these lines, notably in how the present tense amplifies the scene: “I don’t realize the loud voices and the crowding is actually a distraction until my backpack is already unzipped and my things have fallen to the subway floor. There’s wailing. I hear someone screaming. It’s me.” Can you speak more to how or why you decided to use the present tense for this story?

YH: I wanted the reader to be as immersed in the story as possible because she’s living through this, not someone who has transformed and is looking back or telling the story with wisdom. The present tense felt natural. The protagonist experiences it in the moment - even recounting trauma puts her in a state of reliving it. I wanted readers to feel that dissociation alongside her.

KMWR: One of my weaknesses as a reader is finding humor in a story, but I found many moments in this story bringing me laughter despite the overlaying mist of paranoia—namely when the narrator is caught wearing two pairs of underwear with a card holder sewn inside and (!) has a decoy wallet. You’ve published numerous humor pieces—I’d love to hear about how you came to write humor pieces and how you’re so good at it. Any tips?

YH: That's wonderful that part made you laugh! I walked into the wrong writing workshop one day and found myself in Elissa Bassist’s humor class. The class was so fun I decided to stick with it. What I love about humor writing is how quickly you can complete a piece. The biggest tip is to trust your first laugh - if you or anyone else laughs at a line, keep it in! Most laughter comes from recognition, not jokes - readers connecting with something relatable. And include clear visual moments - readers laugh hardest when they can picture the funny scene in their head.

KMWR: “Take My Last” is a story about losing many things—a wallet, a passport, cash, feelings of safety and dignity, but I was very moved by the ending of the story, when she loses her childhood bedroom. I can’t help but wonder if the narrator even lost her sense of self on this trip to Paris. Am I reading too much darkness into this piece?

YH: I wanted to contrast the narrator taking stuff and her relationship with stuff with the irony of getting robbed and having no stuff to come back to. The narrator’s sense of security and control are represented by all the material things that she owns. If she does lose her sense of self, it's hopefully the self that needs to hoard and this lets her start fresh. In the end, she's still alive.

KMWR: What have you been reading recently and what would you recommend?

YH: I just finished Acceptance by Emi Nietfeld. I love this line in it: “As long as I was alive, I could change my life.” There's a bit of anger, like defiance in that line, and this ominous positivity. It's a memoir about getting into Harvard and questioning the whole narrative of overcoming hardship - including growing up with a mother who hoarded.

KMWR: Finally, are you working on anything new?

YH: I'm reworking a short story about a woman and her surrogate. The ocean is a big theme - the surrogate is inexplicably drawn to it. It started as sci-fi, inspired by an image of a woman in a tank, but became more human as I worked on it.

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 Yuqi Hou is an emerging writer based in London. Her fiction writing has been published in Small World City and her humor writing has appeared in Points in Case, Slackjaw, The Belladonna, among others.

Read “Take My Last” here.