- I work half the week and look after my two-year-old daughter the rest. She runs the show; I try to keep it on the road. We see a lot of farm animals and dinosaur skeletons.
Ali Shaw
- The final drafts of The Trees were written during the first year of my daughter's life. She didn't do much sleeping during that time, and neither did I. Sometimes, in the small hours, I felt like I was gestating into something else, like a caterpillar enclosed in its cocoon. The book changed dramatically, too. Writing is just another part of you, and it morphs in time with whatever you're going through.
- Things are always changing, so endings are the hardest parts to write. The endings of stories imply a sense of finality and closure which often can't be had in real life.
- I tried to learn to shapeshift as research for The Trees. Take your subject matter seriously or not at all.
- I still don't know how to shapeshift.
- My hobby is making up animals, then trying to draw pictures of them. Putting them together out of different parts from actual species. I enjoy looking at medieval bestiaries and natural histories, whose authors placed so much emphasis on which human characteristics each creature represents.
- One of my favourite made-up animals is the shaggy beast of La Ferté-Bernard, which got very upset about being denied access to Noah's Ark.
- I don't believe in genre. You might say I'm wary of all forms of classification, whatever the subject. When it comes to books, there's a clear organisational benefits to assigning genre, but I don't think this makes up for the lost chance to discover something mind-changing.
- My street keeps flooding. Often it's hard to find a dry place to park the car. I wonder why I'm still driving the thing at all, when the world is going underwater because of emissions. Sometimes I have nightmares about shapeless sea creatures rising up.
- Adaptation is the principal theme of all my writing. I think this is a more useful word than transformation. We can wait around forever for the drama of a sudden transformation, perhaps even longing for one. Adaptation implies a stage-by-stage metamorphosis. A slow, necessary, clawing struggle to become something more apt.
