Accepting the Phoenix Award for "Keeper" twenty years later, Hughes discussed her writing process in general and specifically for that work. The theme she set out to explore was loneliness. Would one human being living alone from a very young age truly feel lonely? That theme had been inspired by an "Edmonton Journal" description of the boy in the bubble: "David is a three-year-old who has never known a mother's kiss or the touch of a bare human hand. He lives in a plastic bubble ..." (1 October 1974). Only after five years, she saw how to ask "Are you lonely?" in a science fiction story.