CRK: My teenage years were anything but tranquil. A lot of that was because of trouble at home, and with the gender issues I was trying to deal with. And, of course, school was a pretty horrible experience, too. I went to high school in semi-rural Alabama at the beginning of the Reagan era, and, well, there wasn't much tolerance. And because my teachers tended to agree with the other students that I was a freak, and because my parents also felt the same way, there really wasn't much recourse when I got beat up or harassed or threatened. It's just something I had to deal with for four years. Well, actually, I dropped out of high school two months before graduation, which I know seems pretty odd after putting up with so much crap for so many years, but I'd reached a point where I just couldn't take any more and a friend said, "Why don't you drop out, take the G.E.D., and start college?", which is what I did. The recent events in Littleton, CO have brought a lot of this stuff back to me. I mean, I'm so sick of the attitude that verbal abuse should be tolerated, that it's somehow intrinsically different from physical abuse, that it doesn't leave scars or ruin lives.

Q: What do you think are the most pressing issues facing the gothic community at the moment?

CRK: Probably the need for unity, for some sort of cohesion from within the scene. Though I was impressed at how, in the wake of Littleton, people seemed to pull together and stand up to the media when fingers started being pointed at goths and goth culture as a scapegoat. I'm concerned, also, about the way that the lines between the SM/fetish scene and goth have been blurred in the last few years.

Q: Do you see a lot of apathy in the community?

CRK: A lot of apathy? I don't know. I see so much apathy in society as a whole. Apathy and misspent passion, and the latter might be worse than the former. But apathy in particular? I suppose that it's one of the stereotypes, that there are a lot of people who think that because goth encourages deep introspection, goths must be apathetic to the world around them. But I know goths who are activists, involved with everything from animal rights issues to the destruction of the environment to human rights to historical preservation, so I'm not sure I agree that, as a whole, goth is particularly apathetic. I think that if you ask yourself the right questions about yourself (and I firmly believe that goth encourages you to ask those questions), then you come out the other side of the introspection with a perspective that most people lack. And that can make people a lot less apathetic.

Q: What inspires you, in life or artistically?

CRK: Music, first. And then film; film's very important to me as a writer. And painting, especially the Pre-Raphaelites and Impressionists. Literature would come in fourth, I suppose, which is probably pretty odd. But most of the things that I write occur to me first because of what I see and hear, because of particularly provocative or beautiful or terrible images or sounds.

Q: When did you start writing?

CRK: I've been writing since I was a very small child, but I didn't get serious about it until sometime about June 1992. That's when I began my first novel. That's when I said, "I'm really going to make a serious effort at getting published, at writing something worth publishing." I sold my first short story almost exactly a year later.

Q: What other artistic pursuits keep you occupied?

CRK: My writing responsibilities consume so much of my life that there isn't a lot of time or energy left over for anything else artistic. But I'm in and out of music. The last time was a band in Athens, GA called Death's Little Sister. We were together about eight months in '96 and '97, right before Silk sold. We did a tape and got a little local radio play and were getting a following, but there was no way that I could handle the schedule, making practice almost every day, playing shows every other weekend, and keep up with my writing. I finally had to make a choice, which was hard, but writing was paying the bills and the band was costing me a lot of money. That sounds cold, but I think you reach a point where you realize that if you're going to make your living as an artist, free of day jobs, then you have to be practical. Anyway, I'm collaborating with a couple of musicians again, rerecording some of the DLS material and some new stuff for a disc called Crimson Stain Mystery, but it's strictly a studio project and it was understood up front that I wouldn't be able to deal with the live, working band situation again.

Q: What do you see as the main genesis of Silk? Was there a strong initial spark that made the story start to live imaginatively for you or did it grow slowly and cumulatively?

CRK: I'm not sure there was any single thing that inspired the book. I knew certain things that I wanted to book to touch on, and only one character, Spyder Baxter, came to me almost fully formed, right at the start. I knew it would be a book about being in a band, about how glamorous being in a band usually is not, about how hard it is to make music. I wrote the prologue sometime in the autumn of '93 and then followed it toward the book's eventual conclusion. That's something that keeps me writing, wanting to know how it's all going to turn out. There was one point, sometime in '94, when I actually threw away the whole manuscript except for the prologue and started over again.

Q: Where do you see your writing in the future heading, in terms of content, genre etc.?

CRK: That's a very hard question. The book I'm writing now, Trilobite, which is coming along very slowly, is a lot like Silk. But I would like to do something different next time and I'm thinking a lot about science fiction. And I think someday I'd like to move away from genre entirely.

Q: I have heard rumours that you have a screenplay for Silk in the works? How is that coming along?

CRK: There are things I won't let myself talk about, because I can be superstitious. So I'm not going to say much about this. Neil Gaiman strongly encouraged me to do a screenplay last year and there has been some interest. But I've learned that Hollywood is something you can't become obsessed with. If it happens, it will be wonderful (well, unless the film turned out to be a stinker), and if it doesn't, there you go. I'd love to see Silk as a film, because I love film and I think it'd make a great movie. But it could also make a very bad movie, in the wrong hands. So, I don't talk about this very much.

Q: When Poppy Z. Brite did a lecture tour of Australia, she mentioned that her books have not made it to the screen because of unease in the studios over perceived "sensitive content" (homosexuality being the chief problem apparently). Has your work encountered similar resistance by the studios to its themes?

CRK: No, Silk hasn't, to my knowledge, encountered that sort of resistance. But I expect it would, if a deal were to get far enough along. I can imagine someone saying that it'd be a much more "bankable" or "salable" project if we made Niki Ky a boy, for example, so that Spider leaves a lesbian relationship for a heterosexual one. I've been very impressed at how Poppy's handled some of the idiotic, homophobic suggestions from people who've approached her about making her books into film. It takes a lot of resolve to say no to anyone remotely connected to Hollywood, I think, when they start telling you that it'd be great, and you'd make a lot of money, blah, blah, blah, and all you have to do is lose the homosexual angle.

Q: Do you have any actors you would like to see in the starring roles?

CRK: That's a fun game, isn't it? Casting the film of your book. Yes. I'd love to see Christina Ricci play Spyder and I think Fairuza Balk would make a great Robin. Actually, Neil had me send a copy of the book to Fairuza. I've thought about Courtney Love as Spyder's mother and Michael Wincott as her father. But I guess that's about as far as I've cast the book. So many of the characters are already so real to me that it's hard to imagine anyone playing them.

Q: Who are your favourite writers? Any rising stars we should be taking note of?

CRK: Rising stars? I can't think of any right off, but then I don't read nearly as much as I ought to, because I spend so much time writing I rarely want to read. If you haven't already discovered Kathe Koja, she's an absolute must. And Brain Hodge is wonderful. As for writers who have influenced me and favorite writers, there's Harlan Ellison, Angela Carter, Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury, H.P. Lovecraft, Thomas Ligotti, and Peter Straub. And I've been very influenced by the modernists, writers like T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Yeats. Poetry is extremely important to me and has had a profound effect on my writing, so I'd also add Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Yeats and Eliot (who I've already mentioned), and many of the Romantics.

Q: Do you find music an inspiration for writing, and if you do which bands/ performers float your boat?

CRK: I've said over and over that I can't write without music. It's still true. I can't. These days I'm listening to a lot of new ambient/darkwave bands like The Changelings, black tape for a blue girl, and Faith And Disease. I love the new disc from Theatre of Tragedy, though the whole black metal thing usually turns me off. Lots of goth standards, like The Sisters and The Cure and Bauhaus, but lots of new goth bands, too, especially The Cruxshadows and The Shroud. Then there's lots of non-goth stuff: Tom Waits, Nick Cave, Tori Amos, Loreena McKennit, Smashing Pumpkins, Concrete Blonde, Kate Bush, and P.J. Harvey.

Q: Do you consider yourself a dog or cat person, or do the furry things simply make you sneeze?

CRK: I am, unequivocally, a cat person.

Q: Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

CRK: Not usually. I've found that it's very difficult to offer the sort of advice I think people want to hear. So I usually don't try. But when I do, the first thing that I say, the thing that's most important, is self-discipline.

Q: What goth clichés would you most like to see dispatched with a stake through their withered little hearts?

CRK: Goth clichés? I don't know. I'm not sure I can think of anything I consider cliché about goth, per se. Certainly there are stereotypes, but that's not exactly the same thing. I think that perhaps what some people might see as cliché I would see as the beginning of a tradition, of genuine culture starting to evolve from sub-culture. We have to not be afraid to hold onto to something long enough for it to become second nature. We have to not mistake trend and fashion for those things that make us stronger.