Category: interviews

Coode Street podcast fun

Had a splendid time with the terrific folks of the Coode Street podcast! Maybe I’ve finally found my alternative to convention panels…

Nicola and I had the great pleasure last night of a lengthy conversation with Jonathan Strahan and Gary Wolfe on the Coode Street podcast, in which we talked about Hild and the boundaries of SF/fantasy, and corporate politics, and outsider stances. It was fun, and I’m only sorry we weren’t actually all around a table with drinks in hand.

I love the opportunity for this kind of conversation that the internet has made possible. It’s funny, because I generally dislike doing panels at conventions, but I’m quite happy to hang out on Skype and have a discussion that I know people will hear. Perhaps it’s because I prefer conversation to staking out positions and expounding (which is sadly my experience of most panels). At any rate, this was a terrific experience for me and I look forward to finding more like it. I hope you enjoy listening.

Thanks so much to Gary and Jonathan for inviting us!

Enjoy your day.

Interview at Seattle Wrote

SeattleWrote I’m delighted to have this interview about the long game of writing and the generosity economy at Seattle Wrote.

“A lot of people helped me, and my work is better for it. It’s a gift artists can and should give to each other…”

Many thanks to journalist and Seattle Wrote founder Norelle Done for a great conversation, and for the terrific collection of interviews with Seattle authors she has garnered (check out Louise Marley and Matt Ruff for starters).

Enjoy your day.

Interview at LambdaLiterary.org

Many thanks to Diana Denza and LambdaLiterary.org for the chance to do this interview about Solitaire. I enjoyed it. If you like it, please feel free to leave a comment over at Lambda Literary.

    And if you read the interview and came here to find out more about me, welcome! Help yourself to free fiction here on the site:

  • The first chapter of Solitaire

Enjoy.

Talking about joy

Updated with direct links and info.

U2 is home in Dublin for three shows, and you know I’d love to be there in person. But I’m not — so many thanks to Pat McGrath of RTÉ (Raidió Teilifís Éireann — Radio Television of Ireland) for letting me be there in voice and in spirit, by including me in a segment about U2 on the Morning Ireland radio show aired Friday morning, July 24. The focus of the segment is joy in U2’s music, and Pat found me through this essay on the joy in U2’s live performance of the song “Elevation” at Slane Castle in 2001.

The segment includes excerpts of my interview as well as interview/music clips from U2. It’s a little over 5 minutes. Give it a listen here, or at the Morning Ireland archives.

If you’re at a U2 show this weekend — or wherever you are — I wish you joy. Ná bog ar an gcaoi a bhfuil eagla ort; bog faoi anáil an ghrá, bog faoi anáil an lúcháir. (Do not move the way fear makes you move; move the way love makes you move, move the way joy makes you move.)

Girls and boys and everything between

My 2007 interview with the WPR program To The Best of Our Knowledge will air again this coming week (starting on Sunday). I talk with host Jim Fleming about Dangerous Space, the character of Mars, and gender in fiction and life, and do a brief reading. I very much enjoyed the conversation with Jim — he’s a great host, asked thoughtful questions, and gave me lots of room to wave my arms around (in the way one does on the radio, grin).

If you’d like to hear it, you can find your local station here, or use this direct link to the mp3 of the show. My segment starts at about 38:30.

And in the spirit of it all, here’s a little something I’ve always loved. You don’t have to go far to find the wild side — it’s right there between your ears. Have fun with yours today.


(Click here if you can’t see the audio player.)

Reality Break podcast interview

Head on over to Reality Break and listen to my 2007 interview with my good friend Dave Slusher. Our lengthy (47 minute) conversation ranges from the power of performance to competence in characters to the origins of the story Dangerous Space… I enjoyed doing it, and I hope you’ll enjoy hearing it.

I talk in the interview about how special it was for me to put together the collection and have the chance to consider years of work in a contained way. It turns out the same thing is true for me with this interview. Dave gave me the chance to talk about things I’ve been thinking about for a while, and to string together a number of different ideas and perspectives about my work into a single conversation. Very fun for me, and illuminating in ways I didn’t expect. Kind of like writing that way (grin).

Dave, thanks so much for the chance to be part of Reality Break. It was a genuine pleasure.

Interview at Enter the Octopus

Matt Staggs at Enter the Octopus is running interviews with the short fiction writers mentioned in Jeff VanderMeer’s recent list of favorites.

Here’s my interview with Matt.

Enjoy. And be sure and check out the rest of the interviews, it’s a very interesting collection of responses. Matt, thanks for supporting all of us this way — I really appreciate it.

AfterEllen interview

A new interview on AfterEllen.com with Lillian Faderman, Nancy Garden, Sarah Waters, Sammin Sarif, Val McDermid, Charlotte Mendelson, Ariel Shrag, Amy Bloom, Joan Larkin, Rebecca Walker, Karin Kallmaker, and me.

I love this format — a roundup of writers answering similar questions in so many different ways — and I’m honored to be in the company of all these writers. Sarah Waters is brilliant, Val McDermid is a funny, gracious woman in whose company I’ve spent some really good time, Nancy Garden is one of my YA writing heroes, and so on… It’s very cool to read the thoughts of so many smart, intense women who are so diverse as writers.

The link at the top of the post is the direct link to my part. But please don’t stop with me — here’s a link to Part 1 of the article, and the entirety of Part 2.

New review and interview

The Short Review reviews Dangerous Space.

They’ve also posted an interview which, as my editor at Aqueduct has pointed out, does not mention the word “gender” a single time. I get the impression she thinks this is a miracle for me. But in fact it’s not all about gender, really. Sometimes it’s about sex other things.

Enjoy.

Interview: The Seventh Week

I taught Clarion West this past summer. A beautiful, inspiring, bone-tiring, heat-wave-in-Seattle experience in which I had the pleasure and privilege of working with some great writers…

I taught Clarion West this past summer. A beautiful, inspiring, bone-tiring, heat-wave-in-Seattle experience in which I had the pleasure and privilege of working with some great writers.

The Seventh Week, the Clarion West newsletter, published a brief interview in their Spring 2007 issue. The interview was edited for length (I’m sure this surprises no one who has ever talked to me), but they graciously gave me permission to post the entire interview here.

The interview includes talk about why I write, and my advice to Clarion students (and by extension anyone who wants to learn to write).