However I must admit that I do have a particular soft spot for the character of the chameleon-trickster goddess Ris in Dreams of the Compass Rose. Ris has gone through the whole spectrum of personal change and has had the longest road of all. And in the end she chooses to come back to the world, to guide, and to help, and to open the eyes of those who are suffering. In that is her true strength and humorous wisdom. I really do like her a whole lot.
DL: What themes do you find most compelling to include in your writing?
VN: One of the things that I've noticed over the years is that I seem to be fascinated as a writer with the notion that we already have all that we need.
It is right here, all of it, here for the taking, right before our eyes -- happiness, fulfillment, hope, peace, justice. And most of all, there is truth, ordinary and simple, just sitting there to be plucked, if only we get our lazy rear ends off the pillow of complacency. But first, we need to open our eyes to this banal fact. And for that we need a periodic bit of shakeup in the form of an infusion of wonder -- fantastic literature.
And a related recurring theme is the exploration of how we take for granted the things in our immediate environment that are common and ordinary. Existential blindness, of sorts.
Our world is so bursting-full of natural wonder that we are all experiencing a sensory overload. We are no longer perceiving all of the details, just the ones that immediately interest us. Indeed we often engage the defense mechanism of tunnel vision, just to keep ourselves focused on our daily lives. This makes us terribly jaded in our perception of what is really around us.
And here is where I like to burst in as a writer, to take one strong sensory detail or image and instead of enhancing it or directing attention to it by shouting about it, I simply take it away.
For example, in Lords of Rainbow I start out by taking away color from the world, and in the process show color's vital place in our lives. At least I hope that by the end of the book it's a portion of what the reader comes away with -- a sense of how much color perception enriches our lives and how its lack can make our sensory experience incomplete. Even for the people who are color-blind to any degree, I believe their experience would also be affected if everyone else too only perceived the world in colorless monochrome.
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