A Conversation With Guy Gavriel Kay
An interview with Alma A. Hromic
On categories or labels:
"I am very conscious, for example, of how differently a book such as Tigana is read and understood in places like Poland or Croatia, where there is an intense awareness of the issues of cultural obliteration, compared to, say America or English-speaking Canada. This idea of mine, to make use of fantasy as a tool for exploring certain themes obviously resonates in different ways for different people."

A Conversation With Guy Gavriel Kay
An interview with Rodger Turner
On publishers' book positioning:
"If a purely SF house buys a book of mine, they will work to their strength and stress (with cover and marketing) the fantasy elements. If a more literary house acquires rights, they'll go to their strength and think historical, magic realism (a stretch!) or even straight mainstream. I suppose it is fair to say my work, being harder to categorize, offers both challenges and opportunities to publishers..."

A Conversation With Paul Kearney
An interview with Neil Walsh
On going to sea:
"The closest I've ever come to being a sailor is travelling on the Larne-Stranraer ferry. It's not so much the sea that interests me as the nautical techniques of a particular historical period, the 'Wooden World' of the old square-riggers. I am very much an armchair mariner, who devours accounts of castaways and storms with ghoulish fascination. In my favour though, when all about me are losing their lunch, I seem strangely unaffected, so perhaps there's an old sea-dog buried somewhere in my psyche..."

A Conversation With Susan King
An interview with Catherine Asaro
On judgment stones:
"At one point I felt, well, I was overdoing the stones in this book, that there were too many! But they're fascinating. The Celts actually have judgment stones. It is a stone precariously balanced, often on top another stone, so that the slightest touch sends it rocking one way or the other. The Druids apparently used them to decide trials and important questions. They would note the direction of the rocking, east-west or north-south, and it would mean yes-no, positive-negative. So they called on it to provide answer from an outside source."

A Conversation With Rick Klaw
Part 2 of an interview with Jayme Lynn Blaschke
On genre comics:
"So many adults grow up and continue to believe that comics are for children. Publishers perpetuate that. In defense of publishers, though, every time they try to change that, it doesn't work -- with a few notable exceptions. And again, it's starting to change slightly, by the repackaging of them… making comics look like books. You say genre's dead, but it isn't. Literary comics are actually thriving in bookstores. I mean, what do you call something like Ghostworld? That's a literary comic. If it was a book, we'd put it in the literature section, wouldn't we? Mainstream fiction. Things like that are thriving in bookstores. They sell. And who's buying them? Kids ain't buying those."

A Conversation With E.E. Knight
An interview with Alisa McCune
On inspiration:
"H.G. Wells in The War of the Worlds has that long conversation between the narrator and the sapper about a future for mankind under the Martians. That little passage really started it off. As a teen, I used it as inspiration for a role-playing game (RPG) campaign about Earth under these vampire-aliens (in The War of the Worlds, if you remember, the Martians live by drinking blood from a livestock species). My players loved it. Much later on when I finally got around to seriously novel writing I started reshaping that world, because it had really stayed with me over the intervening years as a dark place worth exploring."

A Conversation With Leena Krohn
An interview with Matthew Cheney
On writing influences:
"Hans Christian Andersen and Anton Chekhov, both masters of short stories. Harry Martinson (not as much Aniara as his smaller masterpiece The Way to Klockrike), Edgar Lee Masters (I read Spoon River in Finnish for the first time at 10 and I loved specifically "Dippold the Optician" and "Theodore the Poet"), Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (Il Gattopardo), Albert Camus (especially The Plague) and of course Franz Kafka. Two American writers who have had a strong influence on me are Emily Dickinson and Don DeLillo."

Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman
An interview with David Mathew
On writing together:
"It's like giving each other presents. We're dying to see more of this. When you write alone you can only do it for yourself, but because there are two of us, if I come home from work and she hands me two pages, it's a wonderful gift. It's almost more wonderful than being handed a Scotch. And then I'll take the two pages and rewrite it or something, and it goes back and forth until we literally don't know anymore who has written each scene. To me it seems to go faster."

Ellen Kushner
An interview with Jeff Berkwits
Born in Cleveland, Ellen Kushner went to Bryn Mawr College then graduated from Columbia University. Her first novel, Swordspoint, is something of a cult classic while her second novel, Thomas the Rhymer, won both a World Fantasy Award and a Mythopoeic Award for best novel of 1990...