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

What passes for news is just morbid speculation or cartoonish screaming, followed by diaper commercials.

My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather.

I had been eagerly waiting just such a disaster. Storms, wolves, snakebite, floods-these are the occasions to find out how your father sees you, how strong and necessary he thinks you are.

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. To oppose them, to suggest that one category excludes the other, always feels bogus to me. The great Leonard Michaels line is "I wanted proximity to darkness, strangeness"? That's what I'd say I want from a book, regardless of where it falls on the fantastical spectrum - that suspense connected to a particular human character, rather than just some mechanized plot.

My backyard was replete with madness, it just grew indigenously in South Florida.

I swim with all my strength. No superhuman surge, or pony heroics; it's just me at my most desperate.