So much of the way books get classified has to do with marketing decisions. I think it's more useful to think of literary books and sci-fi/fantasy books as existing on a continuum.

The folks I read as a kid really set me up. I owe a huge debt to Ray Bradbury and Madeleine L'Engle.

Hopes were wallflowers. Hopes hugged the perimeter of a dance floor in your brain, tugging at their party lace, all perfume and hems and doomed expectation. They fanned their dance cards, these guests that pressed against the walls of your heart.

Mythology is a really beautiful vocabulary passed down through centuries that helps us understand the perennial parts of our nature.

I do think there's something when you have an unbroken day, and it feels like you and your attention can just be together like birds again and you can actually think and dream a little.

I do think that I have a more flexible view of the interactions between people, and between human and non-human protagonists, humans and their landscapes.

And I do think that great fiction, even when it's comedic, has an urgency or an inevitability to it, a sense that the writer absolutely had to write this particular story in this way.