Reading about utopianism, and eventually creating characters with their own utopian ambitions, was the way I learned to live with being a pregnant person, to stave off the sense of incipient disaster. You're bringing a person into this overcrowded world, knowing they're one day going to die and there's nothing you can do about it.

Sex is a good starting point for everything.

Song: Heloise and Abelard by Elizabeth Devlin. Beyond the a propros subject matter, this lady can really play the Autoharp. This song sounds like something you'd find on a gramophone record.

When I write a new draft, I don't like to feel I'm tied to any previous version. That's why I don't use a computer to write. The text looks, on the screen, too much like a book. It's not a book - it's a bad first draft of something that could one day be a book.

Writing by hand is a way of letting mystery into my writing. But I'm constantly trying to figure out how to do this job. It's a work in progress.

When I write new worlds, I work in layers, building and throwing out, and building anew.

I'm feminist in that I believe that there should be equality between men and women. I get deeply frustrated on a daily basis by the enormous gender divide in the U.S. literary world. But I don't know how to deal with it, so I don't tend to say much about it.