Have you always wanted to be a writer?
Oh yes. I mean, I wanted to be a rock star or a professional horseback rider when I was a little girl, but doesn't everyone? I won a fiction contest in 2nd grade and was completely hooked. I wrote madly for years. Journals, fanfiction, original stories—I filled up reams of paper.
Oddly enough, I did want to be a writer but I never thought of being published until I was about twenty-five or so. It didn't occur to me that it might be possible, and when I did realize it might be possible to get published I never thought that I would completely fail. I just thought if I kept working I would eventually get there.
Who are some of the authors that influenced your own work?
There's Tanith Lee, my favourite author of all time. Stephen King, of course. Charlotte Bronte (Jane Eyre is one of my favourite books), Robin McKinley, Patricia McKillip, Edward Gibbon, Shakespeare—I could go on all day. I think everything a writer reads ends up influencing the work and teaching hundreds of little things a writer can't learn any other way.
What makes the supernatural genre a good vehicle for the fiction you write?
There's a variety of reasons. The supernatural "amps up" any conflict, and it allows you to take a look at hackneyed themes in a fresh way. You can arrange a situation for maximum impact if you can also create a supernatural element. Plus, I read a lot of horror fiction growing up—Derleth, Lovecraft, Blackwood, King, plenty of others. I also read all sorts of speculative fiction, so those plot devices came very naturally to me.
The supernatural also allows you to examine how people react in the face of the inexplicable. Human beings bump up against unexplainable things all the time. Writing with the supernatural can serve as a metaphor for other unexplainables—the problems of evil, violence, anger, you name it.
There's also, as Stephen King once said, the idea of the "filter". A writer largely writes what gets stuck in their mental "filter", for one reason or another. The supernatural, for lack of a better explanation, gets caught in my filter.
Do you have a personal interest in the occult or is it simply the genre that works best for you?
Weird things have happened to me all my life. I have a deep and abiding interest in the occult, and sometimes I wonder if that is why the genre works so well for me. On the other hand, my stories also have a running theme of redemption, which I consider much larger than the occult window-dressing.
In another interview, read Lilith Saintcrow's views on e-piracy and her advice to aspiring writers.
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