Let's begin with identity. Your fiction cuts across generic boundaries and your citizenship spans oceans. A myriad identifiers could be applied to describe Nicola Griffith. For example, the 20 August 1998 Wall Street Journal introduces you--on the front page--in this manner: "She is a lesbian science-fiction writer."

Is their label wrong, then? Or is it just that you don't like to be labelled. How do you usually react to labelling, to branding?

With amusement. How can anyone expect a label to apply to a living, changing human being for more than five minutes?

Not necessarily. What is a woman, anyway? I can't come up with a definition that really works. I've been trying for years and lately it's got more difficult. One of my first definitions, when I was a teenager, was: a human adult with a womb and ovaries. But, phht, that one got blown out of the water when I heard about hysterectomies. Then you can look at it in negative terms: a human adult without a penis. But how would John Bobbit feel about that? So is it upbringing? But then how do you explain those people who--due to nature, or to the mother taking hormones--are born with ambiguous genitals and are assigned gender on the rather arbitrary measureof their penis/clitoris size at birth (literally: there is a standard size, less than which they trim it down and say it's a clitoris, more than which they declare you a boy, no matter what the chromosomes say) who often decide at adulthood to identify with the other sex? And then there are all those men who get sex change surgery, and women who slap on testosterone patches.

I'm assuming "lesbian" is even more fraught with peril?

Labels can be pernicious things, a real hindrance to seeing the whole. Imagine going to a party and seeing a man with his entire head (hair, face, beard, ears, neck) dyed purple, having an interesting conversation with him, moving on to the buffet table, then, when trying to describe the person you've been talking to, saying, "The gentleman with the very tasteful socks." Yeah, right. You'd say, "That guy over there, the one with the purple head," because it's the feature that made him least like everyone else in the room. (It makes me laugh when people avoid descriptive terms like "black" or "woman" or "fat," when trying to describe someone in a room full of white, or male, or thin people, because they think it's politically incorrect to single them out because of something usually used as a judgement.) Almost everyone who ever meets him will think of him--at least until the dye wears off--as The Guy With The Purple Head, instead of the Brilliant Conversationalist, or The Man With the Neat Socks, or The World Chess Champion (which we might not have discovered because we were too busy asking him questions about how it is to walk around in the world with a purple head). I think that what people really mean when they say, "Nicola Griffith is a lesbian science fiction writer" is "Nicola Griffith is only a lesbian science fiction writer." That's what pisses me off.

Would you be willing to admit, at least, that you're a science fiction writer?

Oh, okay <g>. There again my current project is a series of novels about Aud Torvingen, and they're not science fiction in any way, shape or form (though a couple of idiot reviews have argued that Aud is a wish-fulfillment fantasy figure). Mind you, the books do use what I think of as the tools of SF: my narrator sees things in terms of systems, and groups, and theories; she believes (as do many SF protagonists) that the world is her oyster; that one person can make a difference.

I'm intrigued by your comment about "the tools of SF." Please elaborate.

A lot of SF pretends to be deeply rational: this is the situation; here's a systematic, theoretical way to perceive it; here's the glitch in the system, the problem identified; here's how we go about fixing it. The theory is clean and simple, there are no messy bits sticking out, and the hero is always wholly rational. She or he never says: Fuck this, I'm going to go get drunk and watch TV. They never say: Damn, I'd just about made the last payment on my ticket-me red TransAm and now you want to think about saving the world instead of zooming around in my mean babe-magnet machine? Even in such supposedly paradigm-shifting works as "The Cold Equations," the pilot wants to solve the problem (he's not a psychopath who thinks, oh, yum, a little innocent girl all alone with nowhere to escape to, heh heh), because that's how his mind works. The fact that he doesn't think hard enough (how many articles, newsgroup posts etc. etc have there been lately on all the ways he could have made it possible for the girl to survive?) is what makes this an exercise in false rationality.

That's a huge generalization about SF. What about the New Wave?

One of the other standard tools of SF is the stock (some might say wooden) characterisation. To avoid those messy bits that might stick out and trip up the theory, SF writers often draw their characters as group monotypes. It's "women" versus "men," or "humans" versus "aliens," or "wild outlaw hackers" versus "corporate suits." They're sketched as bags of flesh and bone all programmed with the same particular set of beliefs and motivations: the hackers don't want a nice house in the burbs with central heat and air and fitted carpet; men don't ever want to just get along with everyone else or have a good conversation; aliens are...well, my theory is that aliens always seem to represent whatever outsider problem US and UK culture is currently wrestling with at the time (but I've talked about that elsewhere [The New Aliens of Science Fiction]).

Probably the most persistent character type is the loner who is so special s/he doesn't fit any group at all, Paul Atreides, Louis Wu, Miles Vorkosigan, Kimball Kinnison et al, who are unique because they're faster, or stronger, or more intuitive, or possess some unique talent such as telepathy. Whatever. They have a particular/peculiar view of the world, and tend to believe this is the One True Perspective. Because they're so special, they're able to make a difference, so they do, they change the world to fit that One True Perspective more closely. (Most of these people could do with a good dose of Star Trek prime directive....) As characters they don't change during the course of the novel, not significantly, because they're already perfect in all essential respects. (If they weren't, then their perspective wouldn't be perfect, and if it were not perfect, why would they want to make the whole world conform to it?)

Do you think the same is true in other genres?

Yes. Especially mysteries. There is a key to the world; the hero (who, like the SF protagonist, is Special and a Loner) has to find it, turn it, and set everything back in its place: the murderer in prison, the corpse in the ground, the love interests back where they came from.

What I find interesting are those authors who try, even half-heartedly, to get their people to change and grow--in attitude, in wisdom, in age, in ability, anything significant. Unfortunately, most of the popular series characters don't quite manage it: Spenser gets older, but his attitude and his way of seeing the world haven't budged an inch; Travis McGee gets a few more lines on his forehead, swells or diminishes his retirement fund, but his approach to life is just the same; V.I. Warshowski still hates going jogging and laundry and hasn't learnt a thing about interpersonal relationships...and so on. They don't change because they are utterly adapted, utterly suited to their vision of the world, and their world is static. The system remains unchanged, the theory unimproved because it still applies.

Then there are characters like Andrew Vachss' Burke, who sort of tries to change. The irritating thing about these books is that we don't get to see the change onstage, but offstage, between books, and even then it doesn't seem substantial because we don't see the character considering that change, mulling over what it might mean for him. Compare this to, say, the Aubrey/Maturin novels of Patrick O'Brian, where Jack and Stephen go through a multitude of changes--but they are almost always conscious of the fact, even though that awareness sometimes comes about long after whatever it was that triggered the change. They are tempered by experience; they learn. This is what I want to do with Aud.

I would submit that your characters do change. A signature element of your fiction seems to be protagonists (re)negotiating themselves vis-a-vis new environments. In Ammonite, Marghe Taishan is "born again" by dint of her experiences on/with the planet Jeep. In Slow River, the scion of an industrialist clan reinvents herself on the streets of a near-future European city. In The Blue Place, Aud Torvingen undergoes a transformative moment in Atlanta that detonates her European childhood. Do such transformations reflect your own person?

I have two, contradictory, answers: "No!" and "But of course..." Which is to say, "My novels reflect my life," and "It's fiction. I just made it up."

I've just finished an essay [Living Fiction, Storybook Lives] about the role of story in our lives, and my life in particular. In it, I talk about how, for me, writing is one giant What If. Writing is how I learn who I am. The people in my books aren't me, exactly, but all are aspects of me. In Ammonite Marghe went off to Jeep, all alone, taking a big risk. You could, if you wanted, if you had nothing better to do, read the whole novel as an extended dance play version of my decision to come to the US for the first time to go to Clarion. I didn't know anyone on the continent. I had a plane ticket for a stay of just over seven weeks. I couldn't afford to change the ticket, so even if I came here and hated it and wanted to leave, I couldn't. Then, hmmn, you could say that the gong scene is equivalent to me being back in the UK, trying to decide whether or not to risk everything, leave my whole life behind, and come back to the US to live. But that would be a very narrow reading.

And, yes, the Clarion experience made me feel born again. It didn't teach me much about writing, but it taught me about being a writer. It hardened my will. Talent is nothing without the sheer bloody-minded will to succeed.

Slow River is a bit more complicated. I've talked about the book, its genesis, its parallels to my life and so on in at least three essays [Writing from the Body, Layered Cities, and Living Fiction] and on my website (where all the essays can be found) but the sound bite version is this: I was never abused as a child; I lived in the city described in the book for a few years where I did some things I'm not terribly proud of (and some things I am); I learned, grew, and changed; I survived; I left.

Tell me more about what you're proud and not proud of having done in the city, which I assume is Hull.

Yes, it was Hull, a medium-sized city on the north east coast of England where unemployment is terrible, the commerical fishing industry is dead, and the inhabitants humming with a particularly English (actually, Yorkshire) mix of cynicism and joie de vivre. And, no, I don't really want to elaborate.

How about The Blue Place, then. Where does that sit on the reflect-your-life scale? How much of Aud Torvingen is you?

It hasn't really been out long enough for me to see it clearly (or as clearly as I ever see any of my work) so let me approach this one elliptically.

Reviews of the book have been interesting; critics seem to either love it or hate it; I haven't come across much middle ground. One of their issues seems to be the violence. It's a novel about a woman who thinks and acts with startling violence (and is brutally proficient), and because I tried to write it with a certain visual brilliance and vibrancy I imagine some readers feel the violence has been eroticised. Aud doesn't find violence sexy, as such. She doesn't like feeling pain, doesn't like inflicting it on others; what she loves is the paradoxical frailty and strength of human life. What excites her is living; to fight for her life and win excites her doubly. Aud sees just about every person she meets as a collection of pulse points, and joints, and nerve centres. She knows life is fragile; to her it is so precious that she's always ready to fight for it. In that respect, we are alike.

I think in graphic, technicolour violent images a lot. People can find it a bit startling. I might be in the pub laughing and talking about publishers and what idiots most of them are, and one of those images will just slip out. "Yep," I'll say. "I'd love to come across him in some dark alley while I had my gralloching knife. I'd string him up, slit open his belly and watch, smiling, while his guts plopped out in a steaming heap." Things like this disturb some. Not me. If I went around gutting publishers on a whim, maybe, but just thinking about it doesn't do anyone any harm.

Have you ever seriously injured anyone?

Yes.

Have you ever been seriously injured by someone?

Yes.

O-o-kay.... How about this. You and Aud are both martial arts devotees. How much do martial arts impact your writing?

The awareness of my body and the terminology that martial arts has given me have been a great influence. Knowledge of breath and muscle and balance and the right words to describe what a body does, and how, permeates just about everything I write. That awareness comes from any and all martial arts: karate, tai chi, aikido.

Aud, of course, has the advantage of not having multiple sclerosis, so she's probably better at it that I am now <g>.

How do you deal with the MS? I'm a longtime endorphin junkie who needs his daily fix--cycling, running, nordic skiing--and can't imagine the frustration you must feel.

There are those cheerful, chirpy little cripples who smile and say, "Oh, I'm just so grateful for what I have! It could all be so much worse!" I'm not one of them. Having MS sucks. If I rubbed the magic lamp and the genie appeared to give me just one wish, it would be to cure me of autoimmune disease. Fuck world poverty, peace and goodwill to all men, and the cure for cancer. I want to be able to run and jump again and kick again, to walk more than two blocks, and climb two flights of stairs. I want to be able to work for more than two hours without feeling so tired I don't care if I curl up and die.

What kind of impact has the MS had on your writing?

Enormous. It's not only changed the way I see the world and therefore the way I write about it [see Writing from the Body] but it's altered my ability to concentrate, to simply sit in one place for any length of time, and sometimes to even see the screen or use the keyboard.

I'm not a prolific writer--three novels in seven years--but that's only partially due to the MS. Mostly it's just the way I work. What it has affected most of all is all those non-writing things that writers do. This interview, for instance, is using energy that won't go to my novel today. Last year and this I was invited all over the place to speak and teach--Leipzig, MIT, Penn State etc.--and have had to say no. Travelling is very hard on my system. Then I'll show up somewhere local to sign or read or teach, and some bright spark will say, "But you look great! Are you better?" and I'll resist the urge to knife-hand their larynx and make a bowl of their skull. I look just fine, I don't use a cane, or even limp if I'm just crossing a room, I just have no stamina. Flying somewhere then unpacking in a strange hotel sucks away what little energy I have left and so there's nothing left for the reading/lecture/class or whatever. Now if some of these institutions would fly me first class, so I could stretch my poor cramping legs and get decent food and maybe even some sleep on the plane, and if they would pay for a hotel with extra nights on each end of the trip, and provide me with a walker so that I never, ever had to carry anything, then that would be a different matter <g>.

It sounds as though you really like the public aspects of being a writer. What is it about it that you enjoy so much?

Performing. Writing is a solitary occupation, and I love an audience, so doing a reading is heaven for me. I used to love being in a band, strutting around onstage in front of hundreds of people, getting that energy feedback going, so we all leave more energised.... That still happens when I do readings, especially when it's a good crowd of fifty or so. One of my favourite parts in the Q&A afterwards, the off-the-cuff stuff, where I get to wave my arms around and let rip.

With teaching, what I get a kick out of is seeing understanding dawn in a student's eyes, watching their face light up with joy, the knowledge that they get it. Delicious. I used to teach self defence all the time before I was ill. Now my only outlet is the occasional writing class. I'll still travel to teach, as long as it's not just a two-day event but an extended gig, such as Clarion.

And, well, I admit I love adoration. I love people to look at me and know who I am and admire me. One of the reasons I "chose" to be a writer instead of a singer, is that the singer doesn't get to pick when to be famous: you are or you're not. The writer, though, can pretty much be anonymous when and wherever they like. One of my most cherished fantasies is that one day Kelley and I show up at a restaurant and we're told it's a one hour wait until someone leans forward and tells the maitre d' "But that's Nicola Griffith!" and he waves my party through the waiting throng and wafts me to table. (Yeah, right,like that will ever happen....)

Back in England you used to front a band. Punk? Acid rock? Folk?

Yes. Add a bit of reggae and world music and rock and dance music and you've just about got it covered.

What musicians excite you nowadays? Right now I'm thinking about the Lilith Fair phenom and the polarized reactions surrounding it. What's the big deal about a festival devoted to women's music?

Well, that goes to show how out of touch I am: what polarized reaction? Do people really think it's a big deal to have a festival of women's music? Huh. Dykes have been doing it for decades up in Michigan. It's nothing new.

There again, it was only last week that I was talking to Arthur Woodbury (a great composer and saxophonist, and Kelley's mother's husband) about a book he's writing on the history of music. It's intended to be an introductory text for the general college student. He talked for a while about cultural musical influences, hidden movements and so on, and I said: "So what about women's music?" He had no idea what I was talking about, no idea that for the last thirty years, a whole hidden sub-genre has been forming musicians such as Melissa Etheridge, the Indigo Girls, Traci Chapman, 10,000 Maniacs and on and on.

And their music excites you?

Not really. I've always found the Indigo Girls rather boring, and 10,000 Maniacs anemic. I liked Etheridge's first album but the rest has been a bit tedious. All of Traci Chapman's stuff sounds the same to me (although, again, I like her first album).

The music that gets me going depends on my mood and what I'm doing. For example, I wrote a lot of The Blue Place to PJ Harvey's "To Bring you My Love." It has a wonderful, prowling industrial sound that just fit. When I'm thinking, I like to listen to Symphonie, or the oboe music of Albinoni, or a compilation tape of stuff like Satie and Elgar and Saint-Saens that my ex-lover in Hull made for me. For doing stuff like cooking, I like the blues. Almost any blues of any decade. I love to wail alongwhile I chop carrots. When I'm working up the energy to rip into work on my novel, stuff like Skunk Anansie, or Carmina Burana, or the Chemical Brothers really works. Lately, Kelley has been buying sound track albums, so I listen to Mission Impossible, or La Femme Nikita, or Strange Days--I liked that film, I don't know why it got panned.

Who should direct the film adaptation of The Blue Place? It had the sheen of Kathryn Bigelow's Blue Steel, but a much more devastating emotional payload.

Well, you'll notice that in the novel itself Aud cleverly mentions Kathryn Bigelow and what a fab director she is <g>. I'm honestly not sure if she could impart that sense of inevitability that the film would need, though. Her films tend--as far as I'm concerned, anyway--towards the hero being trapped in some way, and that's as far from Aud and her psyche as I can imagine.

Bigelow's characters are alienated, and know it, and they are constantly trying to belong. Aud is only alien when she chooses to be--or so she believes. It's Julia who sets her straight, so to speak, on that issue.

It must be difficult to characterize the alien. By "the alien" I'm not just referring to chitinoid SF xenobiology, but to Aud, and to "the alien(s)" that you and Stephen Pagel evoke in your Bending The Landscape series...not to mention those discussed in your Nebula Awards 30 essay, "The New Aliens of Science Fiction." In your estimation, who are some of the most memorable literary aliens? For example, I think of Cormac McCarthy's cowboys.

I was brought up Catholic. Some of my first reading material (apart from the catechism) was hagiography, which is fabulous reading for a bloodthirsty seven-year old: women squashed under doors loaded with stones, little children cut up and pickled in a barrel, men eaten by lions. Great stuff, better than Stephen King, and thoroughly approved of by parents and librarians.

Hagiography as Christian splatterpunk?

I suppose. This stuff will always find an outlet--which is probably why lots of puritans got their jollies imagining all kinds of wicked, sinful, lustful acts committed by women whom they then condemned as witches. Every now and again I think about writing a novel about witches. It would be fun to explore the, ah, broomsticks and flying ointment. So many people don't put two and two together...

Er, you mean you think those broomsticks weren't quite what they seemed??

It seems likely and, anyway, and it would be fun to mess with people's heads. I do that with one scene in The Blue Place: Julia comes across Aud when Aud is wearing a gun in a thigh harness and jumps to all the wrong conclusions. Lots of people don't get that, either.

But to get back to the hagiography. The main problem with these martyrs was that I couldn't identify with any of them. I'd try put myself in their place--about to be roasted at the stake, blinded with red hot irons, or dragged apart by wild horses--and couldn't. Why didn't these people just lie? Why didn't they laugh and say, "Surprise! I'm not a Christian after all!" then get set free and go off and be a Christian somewhere else? After all, if god was omniscient (and the catechism assured me he was) he'd know they still really believed, and that was what was supposed to matter. Besides, if you were free and a saint you could go off and convert a zillion other people to Catholicism so god would have a net gain. It didn't make sense to me at all.

At heart I'm a pragmatist: do whatever it takes and worry about the fine points later. The idea of dying for principle struck me then--and still does--as ridiculous. The first rule is to survive because there's nopoint otherwise. Living well really is the best revenge (the second best being to put the enemy in a book and have Aud meet them in a dark alley). Martyrs of any stripe are alien to me.

Actually, I don't find aliens memorable. If they're truly alien, then I can't identify with them; if they're not really that different, then I don't think of them as alien, more as extra-human, possessed of some enviable trait or attribute. For example, one of the pleasures of reading Dune was, for me, the existence of both Bene Gesserit and mentats. Alia was a someone I wanted to be: good-looking, fast, strong, smart, healthy, wealthy, prescient, deadly, noble and willing to play with what others considered immoral. Wow. Who wouldn't want to be like that? In another of Frank Herbert's books (I forget the title), there was a woman genetically engineered to be something like ten times as strong as a normal human. She looked just like you or me, but she'd be able to destroy a bus full of football hooligans without breaking a sweat.

What is an alien, exactly? We all feel different, distinctly other,at times. Even healthy American straight white boys (our culture's Norm) occasionally find themselves in a room full of women and feel the odd oneout. Feeling alien is an particularly human experience. One of my aims while editing the Bending the Landscape volumes was to focus on this paradox, to show how, on the one hand, lesbians and gay men are just the same as any other person, but to show, on the other, what experiences in their lives have made them perceive themselves--and helped others see them--as alien.

In a sense, this is almost entirely at odds with what I do when I write. In all my novels I use a reality-warping narrative technique which is a sort of reversed, literary equivalent of labelling theory. My characters assume that being a woman, being lesbian, being totally capable is utterly ordinary, they don't even think about it; they assume that those they meet will behave as though this were true; as a result, those they meet do so behave; the initial character's assumption becomes reality. The challenge of The Blue Place was to suck the reader in totally, make them believe Aud's version of the world, believe it could be true, even though the novel is set in the "real" world. It's been interesting watching critics try to deal with what I've made. Those that don't get hung up on the violence thing, that is.

Does this pragmatic stance inflect how you write?

I'll use anything--any narrative technique, any genre, any style--to transfer the idea in my head to the page. Or at least I'll try. What seems to end up happening is that I use the same tools over and over. The way I understand the world in general is through metaphor, for example, so that's often how I write. Some readers find it horribly cloying, always being told that this is like this here other thing. Well, tough, that's just the way I work--although sometimes I'll use a whole scene as a metaphor instead of a sentence. Another thing I like to do is make the abstract--theme, or character, or internal, emotional life of the protagonist--concrete, so in my books the reader will often find the physical environment roped in to do double duty as a reflector and illuminator of these things. I can admire writers of cool, dispassionate prose but I'm not sure I enjoy it; it's not visceral enough to me. I like somatic information: the slipperiness of a broken egg in your hand, the crack of a bone breaking, the scent of fresh green olive oil.

"Somatic information" seems even more prevalent in The Blue Place; I was thinking in terms of tactile prose. What other textual markers are found in your work, as you see it?

I can't think of a single piece of fiction I've written that isn't stuffed to bursting with nature imagery, particularly trees and water, and sky/weather systems. My main characters like to get out in the open; they often travel from one place another, using the journey to work things out, about themselves or someone else. I'm a big fan of the semi-colon, of using this doughty little tool to connect two apparently unrelated sentences so the reader will put two and two together.

The look of the prose on the page is also important to me. I loathe huge blocks of unbroken text...except where I want to convey a character's boredom, or feelings of being trapped. I've also noticed that, with some exceptions, my sentences are built for the eye, not the voice. The exception comes when the viewpoint character is aware of being onstage, is hyper-conscious, telling a story to themselves or to someone else, or wholly present and aware but at the same time experiencing what an onlooker might see. Examples of this from The Blue Place would be the pool-shooting scene, when Aud is seducing a young woman in a club, and those parts of the book where Aud goes to the blue place andfights for her life. These are the parts of a book I tend to read aloud. So, for example, from Ammonite I read the gong scene, and from Slow River I read either from near the beginning, where Lore wakes naked on the cobbles and sees herself on a newsmachine, or from the scenes where she is naked and held captive in a tent.

I think what marks my novels as a whole is a literary zoom lens that can focus on something really close up--an ant, a crumb, a fingertip--then pull out to a view from thirty thousand feet, that can be inside someone's head one moment and considering national political systems the next. There are many, many good novels out there crammed with fine characters, beautiful prose and taut plots which fail to satisfy me because they lack the ability to connect the particular to the general; they don't synthesize and show me something new. For example, I've just read Judas Child, a novel by Carol O'Connell, which is nicely constructed, smoothly written and well-balanced, but--despite the fact that I couldn't put it down, despite the fact that the characters were utterly real, psychologically speaking, it was like eating food with the salt taken out. There were no loose ends, nothing that wasn't absolutely and immediately relevant to the business at hand. O'Connell didn't take me anywhere, didn't wander off the beaten path to give me any universal insights into human nature, didn't open up the world in one of those vertiginous changes of scale and perspective for which SF is so well known.

What writers do that for you?

My current favourite is Patrick O'Brian. He is specific, he is erudite, he teaches me about people and history, systems and nature, friendship and tenderness; his prose is lush and full of sensory detail; his plots are a wicked mixture of the believable and the bizarre; he ends at the end; his characters are as real as they get, and they change.

Is it, um, galvanic to live with another writer? Here at Earlham College, the English department is currently teaching a seminar on women authors and their relationships...

It's galvanic living with Kelley. She's smart, beautiful, talented, stubborn, and always willing to explore and learn. Being near her inspires me to be the best person I can so that she can admire me, too. She's one of those people who keep me constantly questioning myself, my work, my life, my motives, and she's always happy to go along for the ride. It's something we do for each other: help each other not be afraid of changing. Sometimes the ride can be wild.

We met at MSU, at Clarion, in 1988. In the last ten years we've helped each other hugely with our writing. I trust her judgement utterly. We read each other's work as it progresses and have enormous influence on its shape and heft. We understand each other, we challenge each other, we strive to be good enough for each other. Kelley is my home.

You've granted no small amount of interviews during your career. Plus, your web site contains an "Ask Nicola" area wherein you respond to fan e-mail. What benefits do you derive from fielding questions, aside from obvious things like more exposure? At first glance, it appears to be an asymmetrical relationship in terms of effort.

I'm lazy. While I love to think, I only like to do so about things that interest me. The best interview and Ask Nicola questions force me out of my rut and make me contemplate other subjects. I really don't like those twenty minute phone interviews with mainstream newspaper reporters because they don't really care what you say; they don't listen; the questions and comments are always the same: "So you're from England. Why did you move here? What book will you write next? What writers have influenced you?" Tuh.

If I believed in altruism (and I don't; I think even the things we do to help others we do first of all to improve our own image of ourselves) I'd say this is my way of helping those who've been kind enough to buy my books...but really I just get a kick out of it. I love it when someone asks me about Aud and her psychological makeup because it makes me bear down and pop those incoherent half-thoughts into the light. Good questions teach me a lot. Most of my essays stem from ideas sparked by interview or Ask Nicola questions.

Are there questions you wish interviewers would ask, but they never do?

"Would you rather have a cheque or cash?" (Ha! I wish....)

When interviewers come to my house, or call me up, or send email, the one thing they never ask is really simple: "How are you?" There is rarely any acknowledgement of my humanness. To most interviewers I'm an assignment; to some I might be a scary figure who gives them performance anxiety; others think I'm an irritation, someone who is taking up their time when they'd rather be doing something much more rewarding, like cleaning out their septic tank. I don't think it occurs to them the feeling might be mutual <g>. A good interview, like a good book, needs at least two people, an exchange, a certain amount of kindness on both sides.

Given free rein and an honorarium to speak at a US college or university, what would be the subject of your talk?

Whoa. Hmmn. I don't know. Maybe something along the lines of how amazing people are: how complicated,how rich and interesting, how many-layered and multiply motivated. How other people are real, not just conveniences for us. How we should never be afraid to dream big. That you'll get more from taking a risk than from just protecting yourself from disappointment, and that you can't learn anything unless you make mistakes. That you will hurt people and be hurt by them every day but that should never be an excuse for not seizing life with both hands and forging ahead. But most of all, that life is bigger, sharper, and more messy than any of us can ever imagine; that it's bloody precious and worth fighting for.

Original Publication: Para*Doxa Vol.4, Number 10, 1998 (c) 1998 by Para*Doxa

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