Contemporary writers use animal-transformation themes to explore issues of gender, sexuality, race, culture, and the process of transformation...just as storytellers have done, all over the world, for...
Fairy tales were not my escape from reality as a child; rather, they were my reality -- for mine was a world in which good and evil were not abstract concepts, and like fairy-tale heroines, no magic w...
When I was younger, I was in love with everything about the British Isles, from British folklore to Celtic music. That was always where my passions were as a young girl, and so I studied folklore as a...
I have a great respect for the academics who are working with the source material. My hat's off to them.
Creators of literary fairy tales from the 17th-century onward include writers whose works are still widely read today: Charles Perrault (17th-century France), Hans Christian Andersen (19th-century Den...
When I started in the business, there was a thing called adult fantasy, but nobody quite knew what it was, and most publishers didn't have an adult fantasy list. They had science fiction lists, which...
Snow-melt in the stream: Mama Nature turning winter's storms into nourishment for the soil, fecundity, and beauty. This is what I must now learn to do with the stormy weather I've been passing through...
Since fantasy isn't about technology, the accelleration has no impact at all. But it's changed the lives of fantasy writers and editors. I get to live in England and work for a New York publisher!
Oh, don't get me started! I love fantasy, I read it for pleasure, even after all these years. Pat McKillip, Ursula Le Guin and John Crowley are probably my favorite writers in the field, in addition t...
I owe a huge debt to Anaïs Nin, because I fell into her diaries, essays, and collected letters in my Twenties and Thirties like a fish falling into water. She was, in some ways, a deeply flawed human...
I only laid the cobbles for the streets of Bordertown; it took all of us, an entire community, to bring the city to life. And that’s as it should be. Community, friendship, art: stirred together, they...
Like many of the kids I write about, I once was a runaway myself—and a few (but not all) of the other writers in the series also come from troubled backgrounds. That early experience influences my fic...