What inspires you to write? Can you offer any advice to aspiring writers?

I have always written, and always read. My grandfather used to say it was a good thing there was no writing on toilet paper because no one else would get to use the bathroom.

To aspiring writers I would say to just write, every day. Journals can be great starting points because we live in the midst of great stories--our own and those of others--all the time. And that's before we start imagining, 'what if?' Writing creates its own inspiration, the stuff of stories is all around, listen for it. Writers need to realize that it's a discipline that is wholly independent of the Romantic myth that it comes from some kind of magical 'inspiration'. It's work.

The best practical advice I had was to find the point at which a story really begins. Do your warm-up writing elsewhere and cut to the chase, don't be afraid to jump into the thick of things. My first teacher tore pages of atmospherics (the landscape, the weather) off a story and said, "It starts here." It started where the little boy said, "Wanna do something?" and the girl said, "Not today," and the story was off and running.

How do you describe your own body of work?  How does it relate to the work of your favorite writers?

Because I have lived all around the world, my work is diverse.  A collection of these different stories will be published later this year in the States under the title The Domain of the Lower Air, (referring to life on earth as opposed to life in the ideal.) The different settings influence my writing--the Italian stories draw on the folk culture, superstitions and dialect of that country, whereas my novel Walking to Karachi, based on the life of my Pakistani-born husband, deals with a completely different set of beliefs and world views. The same for the Aussie stories and the American ones.

In regard to the writers I admire, I can only borrow what another writer said: 'The reader in me regards the writer I have become with benign tolerance.' I mean who can ever be T. S. Eliot or Samuel Beckett or Dante Allighieri or Virginia Woolf?

In your story, “Shattered,” there is much tension between the characters which is related through dialogue. What do you think it takes to create effective dialogue in a story? How important is that to the movement and progression of your story?

I use dialogue selectively. In 'Shattered' the reported speech is always coming from the sensitivity, the mind of the main character who filters what she hears. When I use dialogue, it is in the instances in which the other characters are asserting themselves and the dynamic changes from her perception of things to her being out of control of the action.

Effective dialogue comes from the writer really knowing her characters, the individual rhythms and speech patterns they have. Good dialogue reveals the characters' different personalities, for example, a character who answers a question with "Yep." is very different from one who answers, "Oh yes of course, indeed." or one who says "I see." The main mistake that occurs in writing dialogue is when the writer fails to listen to the conversation and does not report it faithfully. I mean when the writer feels the need to control it for the reader's edification. How many people repeatedly use the name of the person to whom they're speaking, or provide detail of a situation with which both speakers are familiar? As in, "Joe, I mean Aunt May, who broke her leg after chasing the postman." That's telling, not showing and it sounds 'staged' and wooden. Dialogue is not a means of providing background story. It's a means of having characters show the reader who they really are.

Dialogue is a useful mechanism that drives the story because it steps outside of the narrating character's perception and throws her into having to deal with what other people are saying and thinking. There's no time to reflect. It's a more rapid dynamic, more immediate and provides a spark of momentum and in one line, the characters find themselves dealing with the unexpected. Imagine a character who says, "Good morning, how's it going?" and who hears in return either "What do you bloody care?" or "Thank god I got hold of you!"