This interview was conducted as a "silent" interview, taking place in print with questions and answers going back and forth over a few months of correspondence.

LS: Let's begin at the beginning, I guess: you were born in The Netherlands, and grew up in the "army brat" lifestyle. While you often focus on the lives of nomadic peoples-tinkers and gypsies-your work is especially grounded in the idea of place. Ottawa, in particular, plays an important role in you work, especially many of your earlier novels; how long ago did you move to Ottawa?

CdL: Although my family travelled a fair amount up until I was ten or eleven, we ended up settling in a rural community called (at the time) Lucerne, in Québec, across the river from Ottawa. Because of the proximity to the city, it was fairly easy to take a bus or hitchhike into town when I was a teenager, so I spent half my time there and half in Aylmer, a small town that eventually swallowed Lucerne. Eventually I moved across the river, simply because I felt like living in a more urban environment and it was closer to where I worked at the time-in a record store. Then I met my wife MaryAnn and didn't want to leave the area.

LS: What was it that attracted you to the city? Were you yet a writer when you moved to Ottawa? Does it have a lively writer's community?

I've never been much of a joiner, so I don't know much about the writing community in Ottawa except for occasionally speaking at meetings for various groups or running the odd workshop/Q&A session. I tend to know more musicians, simply because MaryAnn and I have been going to the local Celtic sessions for years and for the past few years have hosted a regular Celtic session at a local pub. I also know a lot of the visual arts community-again, because of personal involvement. MaryAnn is quite active with the arts community and, when I have the time, I enjoy taking part in life drawing sessions, an activity I've had to drastically curtail over the past year and a half because my duties as a writer-in-residence at a couple of local libraries have simply stolen away to much time.

The latter, I might add, tells me that there are a great many aspiring writers in the area.

LS: I know you are closely associated with an SF bookstore there, The House of Speculative Fiction, which plays a role in your novel Yarrow, and which published a limited edition of your Borderlands novella Berlin (later reprinted in the anthology Life On The Border).

CdL: My association with the House of Speculative Fiction came about more because of my friendship with the owners.

LS: Is it simply because it is the city in which you live, and are therefore most familiar with, that Ottawa appears so frequently in your work, or is there something else about the place that especially lends itself as a setting? The Little Country, for instance, while as firmly rooted in a particular place, is set in Cornwall, where you have not, to the best of my knowledge, ever lived.

I also like the idea of making what local people think is an extremely dull city, seem exotic to those who don't live here. I certainly don't find it dull, but then maybe it's because writers are trained to observe more closely and anything is interesting if you take the time to pay attention to it. Ottawa's a particularly interesting mix of government town and alternative life-styles, urban blight and natural beauty, street life and wildlife.

Eventually, however, I had the opportunity to travel a bit more widely and was able to broaden the scope of my background palette. While I didn't live in Cornwall, England, I did travel to the area where The Little Country was set and researched it extensively.

LS: Your recent books have largely concerned the imaginary city of Newford which you are creating. The first Newford story I saw was "Uncle Dobbin's Parrot Fair" which was published in Asimov's Sf Magazine in 1987. It wasn't until you had a series of Newford stories in Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine, though, that the city began to take on an identity. Did you know, at the time you were writing these stories in Pulphouse, that they were part of the same setting as "Uncle Dobbin's Parrot Fair"? Do you create the bits and piece of Newford as you need them, or have you mapped out sections of the city and then navigate these imaginary streets in your stories?

One day, when I was asked to contribute a story to the Post Mortum anthology, I decided to set it in an unnamed big city. This way, while I could get the feel of the place from having visited many such cities over the years, I wouldn't be tied down to figuring out the details of which way a street went, what store was on what corner, that sort of thing.

Some time later, after five or six fulfilled requests for other stories in the wake of "Timeskip," I realized that I'd been setting all these stories in the same unnamed city, using a repertory company of characters that I knew I would continue to visit in the future, so I gave the place a name, started a map to keep locations straight, started a concordance to keep track of things...and never quite kept up with any of it. But the stories kept, and keep, coming and since I've yet to tire of the setting, I'll probably continue returning to Newford for some time.

Had Newford not come along, I probably would have done some extensive research in some other place (much as I did with The Little Country). As it is, Newford is so alive to me now, and there are so many facets of it that I haven't explored yet, that I don't want to leave.

Which isn't to say it will be the only background for stories. The Wild Wood was set in rural Quebec where MaryAnn and I live in the summer. And I've no doubt that I'll be revisiting Ottawa again at some point in the future.

LS: You have a very close affinity for gypsies in your work, it seems-the novel Mulengro, and stories such as "Romano Drom"-and portray them in a very positive light. Do you know any gypsies, either in Ottawa or from growing up during your own semi-nomadic childhood? Is your knowledge about them derived from books and stories-the myth of the gypsy-or personal experience? Where did you discover so much about their language, which is oral. Storytelling is an important aspect of your work, and also of gypsy culture. Were there stories of and by the gypsies you heard what drew your attention to them? Or perhaps after you began to study them, you discovered their oral culture as well?

I don't know any Gypsies-or I didn't when I wrote Mulengro. I did do months of research, however, mostly through books, but also talking to people in the areas where the story was set. When the book came out I got one negative comment from a Gypsy organization, protesting what they perceived as a negative depiction of their culture, but many more positive letters from Gypsies who were delighted to read about themselves, felt that I had got much of it right, and were able to separate fact from fancy.

I don't pretend to know, or be able to do more than scratch the surface, of other cultures (or even other genders) when I write about them, but I do try to do it with as much factual research as possible, and with respect, and always recommend to interested readers that they should go on and read books written by real Gypsies, Natives, etc. For more on that, see the afterword to the 1995 edition of Mulengro.

Our lives are stories and the stories we give each other are the most important things we have to share. None of us have a story too small and all are of equal stature. We tell them in different ways, through different mediums, and if we care about each other, we'll take the time to listen.

I talk more about how I feel about the place story has in our lives in short stories such as "The Conjure Man," "Coyote Stories," "Heartfires," for more on how I feel about it.

LS: How does gypsy music fit into their culture and stories, and your own writings? Do you play any gypsy music, perhaps aspects of it fused with the music of other cultures?

CdL: I don't play Gypsy music, although some of the Celtic music I play comes out of the Tinker tradition in Ireland, but Tinkers are a whole different kettle of fish.

LS: The figure of the Trickster, in various of his guises, is a recurring and important theme in your work; when did you first "meet" the Trickster, in your own reading or story-listening? Did you know immediately that he would become a touchstone in your work, or was it only after he kept cropping up that you began to realize this?

I'm not sure when I actually noticed that Trickster began cropping up some regularity, but I'm not surprised, since I've a particular soft spot in my heart for him-though I should also add that I don't think of Trickster as primarily male. There's a female Trickster and she's a regular visitor to my work as well.

LS: Is there some essential connection (for you/in general) between the Trickster and storytelling (I think of the final lines of Jane Yolen's poem "The Storyteller," which you published in a chapbook of her work: "It is all true,/It is not true./The more I tell you,/The more I shall lie./What is story/But jesting Pilate's cry?/I am not paid to tell you the truth.")?

CdL: I think of those lines of Jane's as relating more to what storytelling does: we use lies to tell the truth.

LS: Shamanism and totems seem very important talismans in your work. Especially books such as Svaha are very deeply rooted in Native American traditions and mythology, although elements of these cultures also crop up in others of your works; these same elements are also present in the druidic traditions from which the fey you often write about are descended. Do you have a personal totem?

CdL: I don't have a personal totem, because I'm not from a culture that has totems, but I've had a long fondness for certain creatures, particularly badgers, owls, canids and corvids.

LS: What is your own religious upbringing?

CdL: I was raised Protestant; presently I'm vaguely animistic, but follow only two real tenets that seem to crop up in many religions: treat others as you'd have them treat you, and try to leave the world a bit of a better place than it was when you arrived. I figure if everybody did that, simplistic as it might sound, we'd soon have all of the world's problems solved.

LS: The theme of a dream stealer shows up in many of your novels, especially Drink Down The Moon and Memory And Dream, an evil figure who robs the very stuff of creativity from the character's souls. Do you remember your dreams? Do your dreams become incorporated into your fiction? Do you dream about your characters ever?

CdL: I don't dream much, or rather, I rarely remember my dreams. And even more rarely retain those that I do. Dreams don't play an active role as a source for my writing although I do like to use them in my writing. They're a good way of bringing a character's inner landscape "on stage," serving much the same purpose as many of the magical beings-dark, light and amoral-can.

LS: When you sit down to write, what distinguishes the structure of a story vs. a novel for you? Many of your stories seem more like small novels, even to the point of numbered sections like micro-chapters. Is there a certain scope about an idea which tells you this will be a certain length?

Seriously, I've been doing this long enough that I trust my subconscious to give me a short story when that's what I need, a novel when I need the longer work. I usually only work on one first draft at a time, because if I don't, the images and resonances can bleed into each other. Mind you, sometimes I like it when that happens.

The things I know when I begin a piece are: thematic, what I hope to leave the reader feeling or thinking about; some of the characters; a few scenes. From there on it's a matter of my finding out what happens next until I get to the end. The hard work, for me, is in the rewrites where I have to make it all work and appear seamless.

Like most writers, I'd think, I have more ideas than I know what to do with. So when I begin a project, I pick the ones that sparkle the most and build the project around them. I believe that writers have to care deeply about their work, to enjoy the process, because if they don't, or can't, then why should they expect their readers to?

LS: Some of your novels are expanded from earlier stories; The Harp Of The Grey Rose was first "The Fane of the Grey Rose" in Andrew Offutt's Swords Against Darkness Iv, and Marion Zimmer Bradley published a series of your stories in her Sword & Sorceress collections which later were braided into the framework of a novel. How is this different than writing a novel "from scratch" as it were?

CdL: I would say that The Harp Of The Grey Rose is the exception, rather than the rule. The only other one that comes to mind is Into The Green, where the first three sections or so are based on short stories. In both cases, the novels don't expand the story, but carry on from the end of it-although I did fudge with Harp and change the "end" of the story as it appeared in novella form so that I could carry on with it more comfortably at the longer length.

LS: What is it like to write short fiction in a world you've also written novels in, or other stories? Is it different? You are saved a lot of trouble by not needing to reinvent the wheel, as it were, in terms of the setting, but you must also walk that fine line of making the story accessible to those who've never before read those other work while not boring those who have.

CdL: It's actually more trouble to do so. There's all the detail to keep straight-what goes where, the relationships between characters, timelines, etc. But it can be fun, obviously, or why would we do it?

LS: Your Newford stories have been collected into two volumes, and because of the strong sense of place you've created, they hold together in a way that is larger than simply a collection of short stories, because of their common characters and backgrounds. In writing these stories, are they more like chapters of a larger story-arc, or do you group them together later?

So Dreams Underfoot was unplanned, and the stories still are. I usually only write short stories when they're commissioned because I enjoy seeing what I can do with the theme of whatever anthology it's going into. It's like writing a sonnet or a haiku. There's a certain form you have to follow (usually some thematic element), but you have complete control in how you'll handle it.

I write short fiction for the pure fun of it. Naturally I enjoy writing novels, too, but they're such a huge investment of time, so it's hard, sometimes, to go too far out on a limb with them. In stories you can try anything because if you blow it, you've only lost a couple of weeks work, not a year or more. The experiments-in style and the like-that work in short stories will often subsequently find their way into a later novel.

LS: Do you alter these stories at all when they are collected, to make them flow more connectedly?

CdL: The stories aren't altered when they're collected.

LS: How does writing in someone else's world affect you? You have written two novels in Philip Jose Farmer's The Dungeon series, packaged by Byron Preiss, and also wrote a novel for Byron Preiss based on paintings by Brian Froud. The Froud paintings, admittedly, share many elements with the novels you write on your own; what was the experience of writing these two books like for you and how did they differ, from each other and from the work you do on your own?

They were fun to do at the time, mostly because Farmer's work (particularly "The Gates" series) had long been a favorite of mine and I was curious to see how I could do in his sort of world. I don't see a problem with doing a fun project from time to time. I don't understand, however, how a writer could only do that sort of shared universe work, letting their own stories remain silent.

The Froud novel only required a certain mood to fit with the pictures; everything else was left up to me in regards to the story, characters, how it was told. That was enjoyable because I love Froud's work, but it was also fun to base a story on some of his art-a turnaround, as it were, since he'd previously illustrated a book of mine called The Dreaming Place. Each of the writers for the series was approached because their style seemed suitable to this sort of process.

The Faerieland series seems to have disappeared after the second book (by Patricia McKillip) and I have no idea why.

LS: While you write often about the act of creation, you are also a businessman. What are your writing habits? Do you treat writing as a job? Do you write regularly, on a certain time-frame? Do you write full-time? You mentioned a library job in one of your letters.

It's only when it's done that you then put on the businessperson's cap and begin marketing it, promoting it, etc.

If you're going to write full-time, part of the business of writing is doing it on a regular basis. You can't only write when you're inspired, and frankly I can't imagine working with the fire of inspiration for the year and more it can take to write a novel. Certainly the reason you're writing it requires inspiration, and flashes of it will arise while you're working on it, but most of the time it's a matter of craftsmanship and putting yourself in the same place every day to allow the work to progress at a regular rate.

So I do it full-time, five days a week, treating it as a regular job unless I'm running late on a deadline. And the reason for this is simple: I need time away from the writing-a life beyond the keyboard. I need to have something to write about and I can't simply find it staring at a screen or researching. Life has to be lived and experienced as well, for there to be anything meaningful in one's work.

LS: Have you held other jobs? Do you prefer doing something non-writing related?

CdL: I've been a full-time writer now for thirteen years. Before that, my main sources of income came from working in a record store and playing in bands. The library job I mentioned is a position of writer-in-residence at two local public libraries that has me in the libraries three days a week, critiquing manuscripts and talking to writers about whatever they want to come in and talk to me about.

LS: I know you are also a Celtic musician; do you perform regularly in Ottawa (and elsewhere)?

CdL: I still play music, but it's become very part-time. My band rarely plays a regular gig, though MaryAnn and I do host a regular Celtic music session at a local pub and the other members of the band often drop by to sit in with whoever else happens to show up that night.

LS: Although you have published some sword & sorcery novels-The Harp Of The Gray Rose, Wolf Moon, Into The Green, and in a way the novella "The Fair at Emain Macha"-most of your work is contemporary, usually of myth transplanted into the modern world, or finding magic in the mundane. Is it that tension which draws your imagination most-strongly, of magic vs. technology?

Sometimes a story fits that format, or I feel like playing with preconceptions as I did in Wolf Moon where the werewolf/shapechanger is the protagonist and the harper the antagonist, but I do seem to gravitate towards a contemporary setting for much the reason you cite. I wouldn't consider it so much magic vs. technology, as using magic to expand upon wonders that we have in the real world. The otherworldly characters are a great way of doing that-and also a great way to bring a character's interior landscape "on stage" so that they can interact with that aspect of themselves, rather than spending a lot of time in soul-searching and interior dialogue which I find boring to read.

My rule of thumb is to write stories that I want to read, but no one else has written yet. Now you can go back and look at some of those high fantasies and say that there are derivative elements to them and I'd agree with you. But they were the best I could do at the time and hopefully I've progressed, and will continue to progress, in stretching boundaries-both my own and those of the field I'm working in.

LS: Do you still enjoy high fantasy? Even though you no longer regularly write much of it, do you still read it for pleasure?

CdL: After twenty-five some years of reading high fantasy, I find it hard to read now. Too often I can read the first few chapters and pretty much finish the book in my head without having to read it. The details would be different, perhaps, but the tropes are very much old hat. There are exceptions, of course, and I delight in them when I find them. For example, Patricia McKillip seems to always be able to put a new spin on what's become the traditions of high fantasy. And there are others, but they're too few and far between. I find some of the most interesting fantasy is now being published outside the genre: Thomas King, Jeanette Winterson, Alice Hoffman, etc.

LS: You published three horror novels under the pseudonym Samuel Key, though the copyright page bears the name Charles de Lint. You had a horror novella under your own name in the Tor "triple" Cafe Purgatorium, and have regularly published in various horror anthologies; many of your fantasies also have very dark elements to them, often a vampiric evil. Was this alternate byline strictly a marketing-related decision? I can't imagine, having served as Vice President of the Horror Writers of America, that it was from any stigma of being labelled a "horror writer".

CdL: You're partly right. The full explanation can be found in the Sam Key section on the FAQ page of this site.

LS: When you read for pleasure, do you turn to horror often? Do you read outside the genres you work in much?

CdL: I read as broadly as possible, for pleasure, yes, but also to stay aware of what's going on in the field of literature at large. I haven't read much horror recently, mostly because it started to feel as repetitive as high fantasy-again, with exceptions, of course. But I'm having trouble tracking down much that's both well-written and can keep me surprised.

LS: In your work you often dwell on the way myth and stories are told and retold, time and time again. Do you reread books often? What are some of your favorites, books that you turn to time and again?

CdL: I don't reread books as often as I'd like to, mostly because of a lack of time. Trying to stay abreast of the new books, doing research for my own work, reading (and when I say this, I mean selected articles as they seem appropriate and/or interesting) some seventy magazines a month, it's difficult to find the time. But the first thing I'll reread when I do have some time, are some of Barbara Kingsolver's earlier novels.

LS: You've always had a review column, for various periodicals. There is that old saying "Those who can do, those who can't teach or write about it." You obviously can, and yet you also write about it. Do you think that, as a writer yourself, you approach reviewing differently than someone who is solely a critic?

CdL: I don't think about it that way. I think of it as sitting down with friends and talking about books I like that they might have missed, with occasional forays into more familiar territory to provide touchstones for the readers to gauge my taste. I tend not to write bad reviews simply because there are too many good books to cover and I don't really feel like reading a bad book all the way through, simply to write a review of it.

LS: Are the reviews you write the kind of reviews you'd like for your own books? That depth of understanding/attention?

CdL: What I like in a review, and try to provide, is: what is the book about and is it any good? If the theme is worth discussing, I'll do so. If something in the author's background adds understanding/resonance to their work, I'll bring it up. What I hate are reviews that are simply vehicles for character-assassinations. I've been victim to a couple-the most amusing being a fellow who decided that all my biographical material had to be a lie, and then went on to dismantle the book in question based on that fact.

LS: Does your reviewing ever become a conflict of interest, either to your own writing, or wanting to review (or not review) books by friends?

CdL: I don't understand how a review could become a conflict with my own writing. I'll review books by friends, but since-as I mentioned above-I only review what I think are good books, I don't see that who wrote it is a problem. These days I only have my column in F&SF, which means I can only cover 3 books a month, so there are lots of great books I never get around to; if you're a friend, or you're someone I don't know who wrote a wonderful book, my not writing about your work has no hidden agenda.

LS: I'd like to ask you about writing for other media. I know you've scripted a few comics, Warlock 5, and most-recently a short for Charles Vess. Your prose is often lush with detail and metaphor; how is scripting different for you? Working so visually, yet not being able to control the imagery as precisely as you're accustomed to, the teamwork involved?

My other comic-scripting has been a far more pleasurable experience. I love working with Charles (we're in the middle of another collaboration at the moment) because his imagery so suits the pictures in my mind. I'm not sure how many of your readers know this, but I used to publish small press magazines myself, almost twenty years ago now, and Charles Vess was one of the artists I snapped up as soon as he sent me samples of his work.

The most interesting thing about scripting for comics is that you can write two stories that play out at the same time: the one in the pictures, and another in the captions. A story I did for Joe Lansdale's Weird Business ("If I Close My Eyes Forever") was a delight to work on because of that. It's something you simply can't do in prose.

LS: How is the collaboration of comics different for you than the collaboration of music?

CdL: Since I don't write music with other people, I can't answer that.

LS: Years ago, you published a small press fantasy magazine, and also a small press, Triskell Press. I know you're busy, but do you miss editing?

CdL: Not really. And especially not after coming off a second six-month stint as a writer-in-residence at a local library. There's simply too little time.

LS: What was it you were looking for in a story, as an editor? Was this different than what you look for in a story now, as a reader? Did you have an overall mission or vision for the press, and the chapbooks and magazines you published?

We did have an overall mission-to provide a forum for fantasy fiction. Not simply heroic fantasy, but high fantasy as well. You have to remember this was a long time ago when the idea of a fantasy genre was still new and there were very few paying markets for short fantasy fiction. We also wanted to showcase artists for the same reason.

I use "we" here, not editorially, but to include Charles R. Saunders with whom I formed the press. I put up the money at first, he put up the expertise and I learned whatever expertise I gained in editing from him. I also had to learn magazine layout, distribution, good business practices and any number of other useful things in the process.

LS: You still publish chapbooks each Christmas for distribution to friends and family. A number of these have been reprinted in other venues. How did this tradition start, though, the Christmas chapbooks? Did Triskell Press evolve out of these chapbooks, or the other way around?

The Christmas chapbooks grew out of stories I started to write for MaryAnn every Christmas and "publish" in an edition of one copy. Because she'd pass them around to friends and family, because they wanted to read them, we decided to actually do a print run of them, using them as a kind of Christmas card and the tradition has held to the present day.

They were never-and will never be-offered for sale in their chapbook versions, but usually-and certainly in the last ten years or so-there have been readily available versions reprinted in magazines and anthologies so that people outside our circle of friends and family can also read them.

LS: To conclude, I'd like to know what projects you're working on currently, as well as learning what's already completed and awaiting publication, to give readers an idea of what to expect from you next.

CdL: The next original book will be Trader-you can get a sneak preview at the Tor website. I also have a list there of forthcoming stories, like a comic book script I recently turned in to Charles Vess for his Ballads And Sagas book.

As for what I'm working on now, it's a novel concerning crows and ravens and magic in an urban setting. "Crow Girls" in an upcoming issue of F&SF is a good preview of the sort of mood, although the only characters from it who'll appear in the novel are the crow girls and the unnamed 1st person narrator. I'd tell you more, but I don't like to talk too much about works-in-progress because it steals the magic of actually writing it for me.

LS: Thank you, Charles.