Exclusive Interview with Author Clare B. Dunkle

Here's an interview with the lovely Clare B. Dunkle, author of many books, including "The Sky Inside" (click here to read a review). Thanks, Ms. Dunkle! Check out her website at http://claredunkle.com/

MMR: What other books/authors influenced you when you were writing "The Sky Inside"?

Ms. Dunkle: A lot of my science fiction reading came back to me while I was working on The Sky Inside. The theme of the robotic/genetic mutation subculture was important in Cordwainer Smith's worlds, for example, where people who had been engineered from animal DNA had no rights, even though they had the same feelings and the same intelligence as humans, and for the most part had human bodies. And the movie Blade Runner also shows a world where "artificial" life forms have more integrity and decency than the "real" human beings. That movie was based on Philip K. Dick's novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? And who could forget Marvin, the paranoid android in Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? These sources influenced my portrayal of the bots in the book, who give themselves wholeheartedly to their menial tasks and sometimes seem more appealing than the humans.

C.S. Lewis remarked somewhere that he deplored the dismal, gray-hued science fiction of H.G. Wells, so his own science fiction books pop with color. I loved that idea, so The Sky Inside has color wherever it can. And a lot of the doom-and-gloom science fiction stories influenced me as well. In most of them, society has degenerated either into anarchy (tribal units) or into a soul-crushing repressive totalitarianism. But The Sky Inside shows neither extreme. Thanks to our televisions, we don't have to dress in white jumpsuits anymore to lose our individuality. We can submerge ourselves in popular media images and lose our individuality that way.

When did you first want to be a writer? Why?

I never wanted to be a writer. It seemed too hard! I only wrote a book because my husband asked me to, and even then, I didn't intend it for publication. I was just having fun and writing something my daughters could enjoy. That was in 2001, and seven years later, I've sold seven manuscripts to major publishing houses. Don't ask me how it happened because I'm not entirely sure.

What was your favorite book when you are a teenager? What's your favorite book now?

When I was a teenager, I loved War and Peace. People get put off by it because it's so long, but War and Peace is like a soap opera, with all these interesting families going through interesting problems: tragic good-byes, betrayals, near-elopements, engagements, battlefield dramas. Think about the amount of time people invest in a soap opera. By comparison, the reading time for War and Peace isn't so long. So, for one whole summer, it was my soap opera as I followed the various Russian noble families fleeing their palaces as Napoleon's army swept in. Come to think of it, I read lots of Russian stories when I was a teen: the works of Chekhov, Dostoevsky, and Solzhenitsyn, among others. I was a very serious person back then.

Nowadays, I tend to go back and reread books that make me laugh, like the books of Douglas Adams. And I try to read classics constantly, even though they can be pretty challenging. Currently on the top of my stack is the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, and Swann's Way by Marcel Proust. Proust makes War and Peace look like Cliffs Notes. Wish me luck!

When not writing, what do you like to do?

I spend a lot of time on my family. My daughters are very important to me. Even though they're both out on their own, we wind up talking every day, and sometimes several times a day. And when my husband's home, I drop my work and spend time with him. Beyond that, I live pretty quietly: I fill up the bird feeders and water the plants. And I harass our three cats, who have way too much free time and not nearly enough stress in their lives.

What advice would you give to any aspiring young writers?

Every writer says this, but I'll say it again: the most important thing to do is to live life. You need to be out there falling in love, watching monkeys at the zoo, feeling tree bark, trying strange foods, and interacting with the world around you if you want to be a good writer. Every detail in a great manuscript will come from something you've experienced. It can't just come from the other books you've read.