First, for a little background. I know you grew up in England. Tell me a little bit about growing up--what kind of area did you grow up in, what was/is your family like, did you write from an early age, how did you end up moving to this country. I'd also like to know how early on you realized you were lesbian (or bi, or whatever) and how that realization affected your family life and development as an artist (and musician, from what I see on the book jacket).

I grew up in Leeds, in Yorkshire, in a middle class catholic family, one of five sisters, and went to an all-girl Catholic convent school. Being a dyke was probably inevitable [g]. I remember declaring to the girl next door when I was four that I would never get married; I think we know ourselves quite early. I was thirteen when I realized, clearly, what sexual desire was, and that I felt it for women, not men. For the next two years my life was very, very hard: being at a catholic convent school, surrounded by girls I couldn't touch, knowing that if I did my world would come to an end. Alcohol is a great physical depressant. I began to drink. I was smart enough to get by at school even while three-quarters drunk all the time (though it did puzzle some of my classmates and teachers that I could be so unpredictable). Then, when I was fifteen, I fell in love and, wonders!, she loved me back. Life began again.

I left school at seventeen and went to university but me and higher education just don't seem to get along; it felt like a straightjacket on my mind, the way Catholicism had been on my body. I left after eight weeks.

Then I moved to Hull, a horrible, dirty, depressing and depressed city in the northeast of England, where I spent more than ten years living with Carol, whom I'd met in a gay club in Leeds. We were very poor, very young, convinced we were immortal and that life was one big playground. We had fun for a long, long time. We also had some very hard times when we ended up doing things I'm not terribly proud of now. They seemed necessary at the time. I look back now and think it's something of a miracle that I didn't end up in gaol or hospital (well, I did, once, when I got beaten up by a bunch of boys). Anyway, it was in Hull that I started singing, that I taught self defence, and that I grew up.

It was when I was in my early twenties (21? 22? I can't remember), and having a very hard time, unable to sleep, angry all the time (feminism was very good for that [g]) that I sat down to write a story I called "Women and Children First." It was meant to be this wry, ironic thing about a spaceship zooming through the cosmos on the way to colonising a new planet when, wham, it gets hit by an asteroid. "Women and children first!" shouts the lantern-jawed captain, and "No problem!" the women and children reply. So the only people saved to start this new society on a new world are women and children: utopia. Except that it just grew and grew, and the women didn't all turn out to be nice nor the men horrible, and the children were annoying, and.... Anyway, I ended up writing a whole novel, and I was hooked. What had started as a means to an end, a way of purging myself of anger generated by the injustice I saw around me everyday, because an end in itself. Writing is endlessly challenging, once you achieve one goal, there's always another. This was new for me.

Up to this point I'd spent my life being good and successful at whatever I chose to do, whether it was sports, or music, or academia, or martial arts. Writing, though, ah, that was different. So I wrote another novel, and read it, and stuck it in a drawer, and thought, "I have to learn how to write well." So then I wrote some short stories, and sold a couple, and applied to Clarion, a writing workshop at MSU (I had to borrow money from my parents, who were very reluctant), and came to this country, and met Kelley.

Clarion didn't teach me how to write--the only way to learn to write is to write--but it showed me how it might be to be a writer. I went back to England, a convert, and also in love. Kelley and I wrote back and forth for a year and I came out for another visit. By this time, I was ill (the diagnosis was myalgic encephalomyelitis). I was still ill when I decided to move here to be with Kelley. We lived in Georgia for five and half years. In 1993 my diagnosis was changed to multiple sclerosis. In 1995 we came out to Seattle, and I got an additional diagnosis of Sjögren's Syndrome.

Your bio mentions you taught self-defense when 18. Also, in your current book The Blue Place, Aud is a martial artist extraordinaire. How did you get involved in self-defense, marital arts? where did that interest come from?

It seemed a natural outgrowth of feminism to me. I took an eight week course at the local women's centre, and then, fascinated, started studying karate. Karate taught me a massive amount about will: how to focus it, how to use it. It was around this time that I gave up smoking and other things. (I still drink beer and wine but the object is no longer to get utterly smashed in as little time as possible.) Then I got beaten up one night in a club, defending another woman, and that turned my focus from martial arts to very practical self defence. I started teaching, and continued that for four or five years--right up until I was ill, in fact.

Your books are filled with detail. You seem to either have a vast array of knowledge about many subjects--martial arts, Sweden, art and, of course, in slow river, you paint a detailed picture of a time and technology that doesn't even exist. How much of this is based on experience, how much on research, and how much on a very vivid imagination?

It depends on the subject. The detail about Norway, for example, comes from equal parts research, imagination and longing: I really wanted to see it, but couldn't afford it in terms of energy and time. The martial arts stuff is based on my knowledge, and Kelley's (she's studied Wing Chun kung fu). The technology in Slow River is extrapolation based on research, over-active imagination, and wish-fulfillment (wouldn't it be great if we could use technology to clean up our own mess?).

Your women are very strong, rebels who answer to themselves, not society's rules or expectations. Where do they come from? do you create them, do you feel more like you channel them? are they what you envision as the ideal woman?

They are not ideal women. Far from it. Aud is a really damaged person (she will heal, gradually, over the years); Lore is a tad arrogant, used to getting her own way; Marghe (from Ammonite...well Marghe was more of a tabula rasa, the blank slate necessary for certain heroic characters.

Lore, in Slow River, comes from my need to ask What If about myself and my life: how come some people who appear to be in the same situation choose different paths out? I'm thinking here specifically of my life in Hull. Lore is an exaggerated path not taken. So is Aud: how might I have turned out if I'd killed someone when I was eighteen--and enjoyed it?

In Denver, there aren't too many fem's (I'm a flaming exception, and often feel like a major failure as a dyke). Last two times I was in LA, I was astonished at the number of fems, even the "butches" dressed up. I wonder how much this varies from city to city. What do you see in Seattle? and do you see your characters as a blend of butch/fem?

I couldn't tell you what kind of dykes populate Seattle. I don't get out to clubs and bars and such much anymore: I'm too busy writing and editing and sharing my life with Kelley. I tend to assume that most women are bisexual; certainly most of the women I see around the city look as though they are (and, given the sheer mass of piercings, half of them look like Borg drones, too). The look isn't so much androgynous as ironic: look, we're women, you know we are, we know you know, so let's just do what we feel like, okay? Sometimes that involves skimpy and provocative clothes, sometimes Timberland boots and flannel shirts. Yet it's a gentle irony, it's not the hard, cynical blankness I associate with big cities in the UK.

To be frank, I find the subdivision of people into roles and types irritating. What does "butch" mean? What is a "woman," exactly? What is a "lesbian?" I'm not sure it's really possible to define these things--and why do we feel the need to do so, anyway? Labelling is a reduction of the whole, not a multiplication. I loathe being called a "lesbian writer" or a "woman writer" or "genre novelist" because what the labeller means is that I'm only a lesbian writer, only a genre novelist, only a woman writer. I am a dyke, and a woman, and my novels can be slotted (if you're not fussy about bits sticking out) in various genres, but it's a little like being a woman and being called only a woman. It raises my hackles.

One of the narrative techniques I use in my work is a sort of literary anti-labelling theory: the protagonists never, ever talk about being women or lesbians or whatever; they never think about it; they expect the other characters in the books to treat them as people, so these characters do. There is no sexism or homophobia. It works in real life, too. Expect to be treated well, and you will be. Try it.

Aud has so many strengths but underlying those strengths there seem to be tremendous personal shortcomings--that she started to overcome. Will we see more of her--as much as happens to her in blue place, you still were able to leave so much more for her to do in future books--are we going to see more from Aud? please!

I'm on Chapter Three of the second Aud book. The tentative title is RED RAW, because Aud is half way up a mountain, building a house with her bare hands, and crazy with grief. In her grief she feels as though she has no barriers, the world gets in too easily; it's as if her skin has been pulled off and left her raw and bleeding and vulnerable.

In this novel she has a lot to learn about becoming human: about being vulnerable, about being able to accept the generosity of others as well as giving. Giving and not receiving is a really good way to never be vulnerable, never acknowledge the importance of others in our lives. Aud has been a master of this for thirteen years. Now she has to learn how to be whole.

Violence, at least the "high" one experiences from being in that state when you're life's on the line, is central to the blue place. Have you had any criticism that the book glorifies violence, and if so how do you respond? do you think critics are particularly uncomfortable with the focus on violence because the character is female? lesbian?

There is a perception in the minds of some critics that Aud glorifies violence and finds it erotic. That wasn't my intent. Aud glorifies and glories in life, survival. Winning exhilarates her. Being alive and physical is erotic to her; there's nothing better than using her body to stay alive when it comes down to two people in a room and only one leaves on their feet. Aud loves the sheer physicality of life: tastes, smells, muscles, bone, textures. Violence is one small part of that.

I find it amusing that you can write about multiple murderers and serial rapists, you can write about torture and genocide and sadism, as long as the person doing the Bad Stuff is a male, and as long as the writer is also male. But a woman writing about a woman who doesn't shy away from breaking someone's ribs, well, that's not nice!

The fact that Aud is a lesbian hasn't caused much eyebrow raising at all. Straight girls, particularly, seem to like her. My agent said, "Wow, I'd leave my husband in a hot second for Aud!" One interviewer for an alternate paper here in Seattle asked me if Aud was just a boy in girl's clothes. I stared at her, fascinated. How could anyone who read the book and understands English think that? Still, it takes all sorts...

I understand you have chronic health problems. How does that impinge on your ability to write? I've heard so many HIV+ people say HIV has actually worked to enhance their life, via enhancing their appreciation for life. Has MS done that or do you think that's a crock of shit? I've heard of a number of lesbians with MS and lupus. I know lupus is an autoimmune disorder, and believe (correct me if I'm wrong) MS is an immune disorder. My partner's illness is also an immune disorder. Any thoughts on whether or not the lesbian community seems to be getting hit with immune problems more than the general population?

It's a crock. I appreciated life very well before I was ill, thank you. I would kill (literally) to be able to run again, to be able to go hiking, to not constantly have the world greyed out by crushing fatigue.

MS has changed me, changed the way I perceive the world, I wouldn't want to lose that perspective because it forms part of who I am now, and I quite like who I am, but, hey, if it came down to a choice--that perspective for my health--I'd choose the cure in a hot second. I'm not one of those chirpy, happy little cripples. Being ill sucks. Period.

I don't think dykes are any more susceptible to immune system disorders than anyone else. I think we just process about it more .

As we're entering the next century, we can look back and see that the entire queer community has made great strides over the last century. More people are "out" then ever before, slowly but surely a greater percent of the larger community is moving from intolerance to tolerance to acceptance. The religious right is still fighting hard and we still have fights ongoing. There is ongoing debate within our community about us moving too much toward assimilation, risking losing some of what makes us unique as a subculture. Care to comment?

I don't believe lesbians or gay men or bisexuals or the transgendered are any more or less human than any other segments of the population. Whenever we start seeing the world in terms of Us and Them, we're in trouble. If there is something unique about g/l/g/t sub/culture, then it will survive acceptance. Think of the Irish. There used to be terrible discrimination against them as early immigrants; now there isn't. But they still have their music and parades and shamrock and Guiness and traditional occupations like cop and priest. They just don't have to be cops or drink Guiness or sing about Kevin Barry anymore. No doubt in fifty years we'll still have mardi gras and gay pride and halloween and bars and softball leagues and potlucks, but we'll be able to marry, and visit each other in prison, and adopt, and join the army to kill people, too, if we want. Gay men will still be able to be hairdressers, if they want, but they'll also be acceptable as President, just as a dyke could write the Heloise newspaper column.

Anything else you'd like our readers to know about you, your work, your life, etc., etc.

Can't think of anything, offhand.

The murder of Matthew Shephard has affected all of us. But I fear it has especially affected our youth--many of whom are still in the closet, many more who are out, but just barely. Would you like to send a message to the g/l/b/t youth of Colorado?

There's nothing wrong with you and don't let anyone tell you otherwise, ever. Life is a great adventure: grab it with both hands.