I wanted to create stories that read as if they came from the body of lost history. I had the sense, and have it now, that most of the history of most of the world has necessarily always been lost. And partly I wrote the stories to console myself for this loss, which I felt as a wound — a wound in the world, but also a personal wound, a loss as 'original' to me as some people think sin is to mankind. A powerful sense of challenge and joy resides for me in the notion that there is a vast repository of untold story I can make and remake.