Just One Thing with Ashley Lopez

Ashley Lopez’s May issue story “The Body Farm” is an existential crisis in 30 paragraphs. Here she shares just one thing about the piece:

"The inspiration for this story came from an old article I stumbled across in National Geographic about white-tailed deer eating human remains. This was during a time in the pandemic when I was really missing home and there was something about the need to survive against nature that drew me to the grainy photos of these herbivores caught crunching on bones. I started researching the different ways forensic scientists use cadavers to learn about decomposition, how they use pig carcasses along the border to see what happens to the people who perish in the desert, how some cadavers are encased in metal cages to keep birds of prey away. I kept coming back to the same question: Does scrutinizing the dead make the lives of the living any better? It's an idea I continue to mull over and a question I eventually channeled into ‘The Body Farm.’"