It's appropriate to have magic in a love story, because magic is a sort of metaphor for what love feels like? When we fall in love, the world feels magical to us. It becomes an enchanted place.

I would tell myself to get more sleep! Believe it or not, I wrote the book while finishing my PhD in English literature. It was wonderful to get away from doing literary scholarship by writing this mythical love story. I think so much of my own love for books and scholarship comes through in The Thorn and the Blossom.

If you believe you have a voice and something to say, chances are you do, and the world needs you to do whatever you're drawn to do. So you should do it.

I talked on my blog recently about "uncommon sense." Common sense is called "common" because it reflects cultural consensus. It's common sense to get a good job and save for retirement. But I think we all also have an "uncommon sense," an individual voice that tells us what we're meant to do.

I loved writing something I'd never written before, and I wanted to write not just about "true love" but also a human relationship.

I put that part of myself into both Brendan and Evelyn [from The Thorn and the Blossom] - as well as some of my own anxieties about the academic life!

Writing two stories [in the Thorn and the Blossom] about the same set of events that were complete stories in themselves, but also added up to a larger story. As I was writing them, I kept going back and forth, because something would happen in one story that would have to be reflected in the other story. And yet the same event would also have to be perceived in different ways by Brendan and Evelyn, because they are different people with their own interpretations.