TDS: I discovered your work in the form of Tam Lin, during my sophomore year in college. You were the first author I had read who used credited threads from other authors to weave out your story. You used Shakespeare, Keats, Byron, Tennyson, Spenser, Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and a host of others in a way that made their original works seem even more magical than before. I next read your book The Dubious Hills and was amazed at how you had used classic literature as mythological mortar between the bricks of the story and plot. In Juniper, Gentian and Rosemary you continued with a device employed in Tam Lin, using music apropos to the story's timeline to help deliver the characters. You also brought in a great deal of scientific information, reminding me in no small way of another favorite author, Madeleine L'Engle.

PD: L'Engle is definitely a great influence on me. When I first read A Wrinkle in Time, which was pressed upon me in the sixth grade because it had won the Newbery Award, I was wildly excited, and believed that all winners of the Newbery Award would be like this book. I was desperately disappointed to find out that they were not. I was, if anything, even more desperately disappointed, though I got over it to some extent, to discover than not even the rest of L'Engle's books were like that book.

TDS: How did you come upon this style of writing?

PD: To a considerable extent, it's just the way my head works. My memory is not quite as good as it used to be, and I have somewhat more confidence in my ability to make things up and use language well, but as a child, a teenager, and a young adult, I had a head stuffed full of quotations, and when I wanted to write something, usually a quotation would come into it someplace. Sometimes they just had to come out even if I wasn't writing. I charmed my high-school chemistry teacher by appending quotations to the ends of my tests.

Reading Victorian literature, whether it was Alcott or Bronte or Eliot or Dickens, to a considerable extent reinforced my belief that this was how one wrote. Lewis Carroll provided a skewed example of the same thing. Then I hit, as I said, A Wrinkle in Time, where Mrs. Who can talk ONLY in quotations. Not so terribly long afterwards, I read E.R. Eddison's Zimiamvian trilogy, which is also full of quotations. I was weirdly charmed, possibly in much the same way as my chemistry teacher was with me, to discover that the denizens of Mercury quoted Elizabethan songwriters. So I knew it was all right to do this kind of thing even if one lived in the 20th century.

TDS: Do you work to fit classical references into your text, or is the text built around them?

PD: Ummm, neither? Both? It would be work to keep them out, really.

Once I've fallen in with a character, like Dominic [the antagonist from Juniper, Gentian and Rosemary], or a set of entities, like the unicorns in the Secret Country books, that speaks largely in quotations, I do sometimes have recourse to Bartlett's, or to paging through my favorites, in search of something that fits.

As I said, my memory is not as good as it used to be. I also try hard to put more modern things in where I can, though in that case one has to worry about getting permission to quote, which can put a damper on the entire matter. The original version of The Dubious Hills had a fine selection of quotations from William Butler Yeats, but I had to take them out at the eleventh hour when I discovered that, at least at that time, Yeats' work was in the public domain everywhere EXCEPT IN THE U.S. But I digress.

TDS: It is obvious in your work that you are a student of literature and science. Many people see no relation between the two. What do you see as the greatest partnership between the art of writing and the art of science?

PD: Possibly I don't understand the question. If I do, my immediate off-the-top-of-my-head answer is "John M. Ford's short story 'Erase -- Record -- Play," but then I think, "No, it's really his story 'Heat of Fusion' and then I think, "No, no, it's his novel Growing Up Weightless and then I think, "No, no, no, it's his poem 'Cosmology: A User's Manual.'" Once I manage to get my mind off Ford, I wonder if I should think of scientific writing, and am tempted to nominate Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species, and then I think really it ought to be Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific, for reasons that readers of Tam Lin will know. Then I think of all the science writing I haven't read, I think confusedly of Stephen Jay Gould and the author of Lives of a Cell (I told you my memory was bad), and then start thinking of science-fiction writers from Simak to Bujold to Nagata to oh, look, Ford again; and come to a complete halt, persuaded that I am unread as well as forgetful.

I don't think I'm qualified to have an opinion. Lem! Milton! Dante!

You know what, if I could just start over and then stop right away, I'd probably say, Burnham's Celestial Dictionary.

No, wait, wait –

TDS: You create amazing new worlds in your works and illuminate the real world with magical language. In The Dubious Hills and in your Secret Country series, the worlds your characters inhabit are almost characters themselves. How do you go about building these other places?

PD: Well, in the case of the Secret Country books specifically, I didn't do anything. The characters did it. This was a device to sneak past my feelings of inadequacy as a new writer. I knew I could manage good characterization, but world-building was very daunting to me. It didn't daunt the characters at all.

TDS: I wonder, especially in The Dubious Hills, how were you inspired to write a place where society was so structured that each person had an exact place and nothing more?

PD: What you said above about magical language is completely true of the genesis of that novel. That is, I was simply noodling about in my head one day about what "The Dubious Hills" might mean, what kind of a country it might be. The next level up for the idea of that society came when I was invited to write a short story set in the world of the Secret Country books, for an anthology that never actually got sold to a publisher. I don't do very well with short stories; if they are not to become novels, they need a lot of constraints. My original idea was for an almost allegorical fairy-tale-like narrative, much more indebted to Plato than even the eventual novel is. I abandoned the story when the anthology didn't sell, and later on it came back and demanded to be a novel.

TDS: Continuing on with The Dubious Hills, you bring up interesting questions in this work about how knowledge affects life. Works of classic literature bring knowledge, offer insight, and force mental activity. How important do you think it is to teach the classics in primary and secondary education?

PD: I am so not qualified to answer a question like that. I know nothing of education. I would like to remark, though, that the canon of Western literature is limited and sometimes practically throttled by extreme cultural bias, and that some of its members are there because they are teachable rather than because they are appealing, and that none of them appeal to everybody. I don't think, in any case, that I myself was taught any classic literature in primary school. I was also horrified beyond belief when my cherished and adored Ray Bradbury had three stories included in a reader for 8th graders, and was subject to the same (to my mind, at the time) reductive and idiotic questions as the more boring other stories in the book. I felt right up until I took A.P. English in 12th grade that my school reading and my real reading were completely disjunct [sic], and I resented mightily any encroachment of the one upon the other.

What converted me to the belief that it was possible to read meaningfully in an academic context was a particular teacher, the A.P. English teacher, and not any specific works.

I think children, and anybody, ought to have the chance to read widely and indiscriminately and without a lot of prissy reductive adult yammering about their choices, and to have easy access to someone who is able to put the reading in context and to answer questions. I really can't go further than that.

TDS: If you were asked to set the reading curriculum for a senior in high school, which three works would make up your core of studies?

PD: If I were asked to do anything of the sort, I'd decline fervently.

If I were landed with the responsibility for a particular senior in high school and could not escape, which works I considered to be part of the core would depend on the student.

TDS: That’s fair! Do you have five works you think everyone should read before leaving school and why?

PD: I don't. Some people ought to read Homer at age eleven and some people are ready at thirty, and some probably not till fifty. I can say what works it was good for me to have read by then, but I really don't feel that my experience is very generalizable [sic], and I certainly wouldn't dictate to any school. Literature is too individual and skittish.

I could answer the question about scientific works with much more confidence, though I'd have to do some research first. Anyway, some works that benefited me:

Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass (yes, I'm cheating; in my head they were all one book, since they were in the same volume)

Homer, The Iliad

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book

Some more works that are not generally considered classic that also benefited me:

Harlan Ellison, Paingod and Other Delusions

Robert A. Heinlein, The Door into Summer

G.K Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet

Every single available work of Louisa May Alcott, however cloying.

The first Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison

I could go on and on listing stuff and still think of more books tomorrow.

TDS: You have reprints of your Secret Country series in the works, and I encourage all fantasy lovers to pick up this trilogy, especially those with children. When someone reads your work, what do you want them to take away from it?

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