And if I love a book why would I want to forget all the wonderful times I’ve had reading it so far?

I had a dream about being at a fancy awards dinner, and winning, and waking up knowing it was the Booker Prize, and that I would win it one day.īooks I wish I could read again for the first time? None. Or perhaps it might be more true to say I didn’t realize I wanted to be a writer until I was in my twenties. I didn’t decide to be a writer until I was in my twenties. I wanted to write early on pinning down a description or a moment or a feeling felt like a triumph. To me there’s a difference between wanting to Be a Writer and wanting to write. But did any of them make me want to be a writer? Every single book I’ve ever read has added to what I know of story and writing those books made me the writer I am. The books that made me want to be a writer? All of them. He wrote some modernist historical fiction that’s most definitely unsuitable for children-unless you believe casual sexual violence is appropriate-yet I read them when I was eight or so. Or maybe it was just that they got confused about some historical writers who also sometimes wrote for children. My local library as a child seemed to operate on the principle that if you could reach it you could borrow it. I loved to read, and I read everything in reach.

The same kind of reader most writers are, I think: hungry. We conversed over the summer, just after the launch of So Lucky. Nicola Griffith and her wife, writer Kelley Eskridge, live in Seattle. Her most recent novels are the highly-acclaimed seventh century epic Hild (a sequel, Menewood, is in the works), and So Lucky, a sharp, dark gem of a thriller, haunted by the manmade monsters that our current political reality has lured out of hiding. She’s a literary scholar and an activist, bringing vital critical attention to writing by and about people with disabilities. to the Washington State Book Award and the Lambda (which she has collared an impressive six times). Griffith has published many stories and seven novels in multiple genres, won awards from the Nebula and the James Tiptree Jr. I was an avid mystery reader, and an aspiring-writer baby dyke, unsure of whether there was a place for someone like me in the literary canon, and Nicola Griffith lit a way forward. The Blue Place was the first in a series of novels starring the most nuanced (and hands-down sexiest) queer woman crime fighter ever to appear in a literary thriller. I worked at The Crumpet Shop in Pike Place Market, and on my breaks read books I found around the corner at Left Bank Books. I was nineteen years old the first time I encountered Nicola Griffith’s work. Nicola Griffith in conversation with Alexis M.