I'm interested in endurance. People persist in the face of the most excruciating hardships.

We are like flowers always reaching up towards some shred of light. I find this wondrous, nearly magical, certainly brave.

The language of the novel differs from the just-the-facts language of the old tales. It's robust and earthy, sometimes even baroque.

Writing, for me, is always a dance between the critical part of my brain and the subconscious.

We grow, we mature, some of us give birth, we age, we die.

Things, very strange things, happen in folktales and there is never much attention given to the whys and wherefores.

Because answers are inert things that stop inquiry. They make you think you have finished looking. But you are never finished. There are always discoveries that will turn everything you think you know on its head and that will make you ask all over again: Who are we?