Strictly speaking, my interest is not in legal rights for animals but in a change of heart towards animals.
I see no marks of Wordsworths style of writing or style of thinking in my own work, yet Wordsworth is a constant presence when I write about human beings and their relations to the natural world.
I read a great deal as a child. A lot of children go through a phase of reading in a literally voracious way. It is their primary imaginative activity. Maybe that's an experience which is not so common any more with the presence of television in every home.
If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?
The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role.
I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction.
