Smoke Screen or Window

Last week I talked about writing stories out of our questions, not as a vehicle for imposing our answers on the world. It’s a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot recently.

I began writing Blue-Eyed Wolf, the young-adult novel I’m working on now, to explore topics about which I hold firm convictions: war, religion, the desecration of our natural world, family loyalty, sexuality. The convictions with which I began, in fact, were so firm and so clear that I had to work hard not to dump them in t...