On the jacket copy your work is described as "sudden fiction." Some of the pieces look like poems, some are letters. What are you doing with form in Depending on the Light?
I'm interested in exploring the places between form. Celebrating liminal spaces, what happens with hybridity. I borrow other people's writing, I take from graffiti, women's forms of writing, like journals or letters or fragments. I'm referring back to people, I'm referring forward to other people, and I'm trying to destabilize the meanings, to create a moment of surprise for the reader.

How do the sixty-four pieces work together?
The pieces are in conversation with each other, and the five [themed] sections are in conversations with each other. You think something's maybe about family, but it's also about being queer. Or you think something's about sex, but it's also about family and being queer and changing the world.

Is there a common, if multifaceted narrator across the book? The last letter is signed "Thea," for example, but some of the pieces are in third person.
I think there's a narrative of an "I" but not a narrator. This book is definitely about the shifting nature of identity. Your assumptions are what make up identity and that's changing all the time. But that said, there's probably a "Thea" that goes throughout the book whether I tried to do that or not.

How long did it take you to write the book?
There's a poem in there that happened when I was five. So it's 25 years of writing, with about three years of turning it into a book.

Which one was from when you were five?
The peanut butter one. And you know what's funny? I actually think that's my mom's poem. I said those words to her when I was five, but it never would have been a poem if it hadn't been recognized as a poem. And so it's almost my mom's poem because she's the one who thought to write it down when I was little.

You write about being on tour in the book, and this summer you're taking the book on tour again. What is the impact of reading your work around the country?
I really want the book to be a conversation between the reader and the author and the reader and the world. I think taking the book on tour is just extending that conversation, bringing more people in. It's so incredibly different to read it in different places, even just in San Francisco: I read it in Cafe International, with mostly African-American people getting up and singing acappella R&B and gospel in the open mike, and they cheered my poems; and then I read at City Lights, and everybody was "poetry" moaning after poems; and I read at this dyke open mike and they were fuckin' silent. And, you know, I had to bust out and be really loud at Cafe International, and I have to be sweet and connect with people and be real at City Lights, and at the dyke open mike, I don't know what I have to do.

What is it like to have the book out in the world?
Some of the scariest stuff for me in the book has to do with stuff I put out there in terms of the butch/femme dynamic. And I was really surprised that I was scared to put that out there. I think I'm probably going to offend some people. I also deal really directly with race issues; there were some things that were really scary to put into the book and some I took out depending on my comfort level. But my project is definitely to push myself and to go to uncomfortable places. Putting this book out feels like a risk. But also it's a risk that's paying off. It's totally moving people. They come up to me with tears in their eyes; or they say, "I feel like I know you." They feel recognized, and they feel like we just had this intense connection, and that's exactly what I wanted.

ELIZABETH STARK'S DEBUT NOVEL, SHY GIRL WAS A LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST.

For Hillman's tour schedule go to Her website.

(C) 2001 Lambda Book Report. via Bell&Howell Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved