I suspect it's no surprise to those who've read "The Square That Hides a Thousand Stories" that the story was inspired, in part, by tangram puzzles. Sometimes you'll see tangrams referred to as a storytelling device, and one fanciful history of the puzzle from a hundred years ago claimed (with no evidence) that the puzzle originated over 4000 years ago as a gift from the god Tan. Neither claim is reflective of the puzzle's actual history. Most reports I can find suggest that the puzzle was invented--as a puzzle, not a storytelling device--in China in the 18th century. It's possible that it predates those first references by some years, and it certainly has antecedents in a variety of sources in the preceding centuries, but it is vanishingly unlikely that it dates back thousands of years (and there is no evidence of the supposed god Tan).
Yet the idea of such an ancient origin entertained me, and the tangram is used today in school classrooms as a storytelling device as well as a mathematical manipulative. So I started with the idea that the puzzle (or something similar to it) truly was that old and that its original purpose was for telling stories. And if that old...then likely it would have spread to many other places in antiquity as well, and inspired local legends wherever it ended up. So that is how this story came about.
Editor's note--Daniel Ausema's story The Square That Hides A Thousand Stories, is in Penumbra's inaugural issue, available now at www.musapublishing.com.
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