“I wanted it to be as multi-windowed as possible, so that the reader felt like they were seeing all the different ways in to a big haunted house.”

I can describe at length every feature on the character, though I might only supply a glimpse of this on the page. So if I’m writing color into that I’m also writing texture, I’m pushing the image more than anything else.

The High Divide, a novel about a family in peril, is haunting and tense but leavened by considerable warmth and humanity. Lin Enger writes with durable grace about a man’s quest for redemption and the human capacity for forgiveness.

I grew up with guns. For my 16th birthday, in fact, I received a .357 instead of a car. But there was nothing playful about them; they were tools.

You can’t teach talent, but you can teach people how to read strenuously and mimic the moves of rock-star writers so that they eventually accumulate a toolbox of skills.

I grew up on genre – on Westerns, spy thrillers, sci-fi, fantasy novels, horror novels. Especially horror novels.

Writing is an act of empathy. You are occupying and understanding a point of view that might be alien to your own–and work is often the keyhole through which you peer.

I have a scenario but almost always it’s entwined with at least one person to begin with. Then I sort of expand from there and I’m thinking about books novels.

My voice dropped when I was 14. And when I was 14, I might have weighed 75 pounds. So you can imagine how strange that must have been: like James Earl Jones speaking through a sock puppet.

I want to build as many worlds as possible – each a version of ours with a crack running through it – and not be anchored to any of them.

People talk about me as masculine. Because of the way I walk and talk and crank out pull-ups and smell like bacon.

And then once I figure out who they are I can figure out what they want and once I figure out what they want I’m able to put obstacles in the way of that desire, and that’s where plot springs from.

I think my leap into TV and movies and comics is in a way natural because I’m a visual storyteller. If you look at any one of my short stories or novels, they sort of unscroll cinematically.

It’s very helpful to start with something that’s true. If you start with something that’s false, you’re always covering your tracks. Something simple and true, that has a lot of possibilities, is a nice way to begin.

For now, poetry has the capacity – in its own ways and by its own means – to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.

We see daily that our lives are terrible and little, without continuity, buyable and salable at any moment, mere blips on a screen, that this is the way we live now. Memory marketed as nostalgia; terror reduced to mere suspense, to melodrama.

And the BMA sent a writ my wayWith the very first leper I cured.

We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

This is one of the ways in which women’s work and thinking has been made to seem sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own.

Everybody’s got a different way of telling a story – and has different stories to tell.

A hundred years from now, people will listen to the music of the Beatles the same way we listen to Mozart.