I was interviewed by Heather Fowler at Fictionaut last month for the Writers on Craft series. Heather is a good friend, a member of the Legion of Vermin and we’ve been reading each other’s work for years. You would think this would make answering the questions easier, but these were tough.

What do you feel is the purpose of literature?

To me, literature feels bound to the context of its creation in ways that don’t register in other arts. That’s probably a bias on my part, but there it is. Literature attempts to teach the reader about class, sex and power in human relationships at a particular moment in time. It’s meaningless, of course. We’re all passengers on this dinky life raft we call earth. We haven’t gotten to the kill-or-be-killed part of the endgame where your next-door neighbor starts to look like a roasted chicken, but we’re getting there. The water is slopping over the gunwales and we’re squabbling over when we need to start baling.