KS: Sure.

BW: My first question relates to an earlier 1996 interview. In that interview you said that your audience was “yourself to some extent.” A lot has changed for you personally and professionally since then and I wanted to know, do you still picture yourself as the primary audience or do you picture a different audience when you are writing?

KS: That's a good question. I’m certainly much more aware of an audience now than I was then, and in fact I find that quite inhibiting in many ways. However, I think I still write—I try to write—for myself, really. I’m much more aware of a wider audience, but also that that audience is in reality rather small. Perhaps that's because I write to explore things, obsessions among other things. Perhaps it is because the audience for literature itself is diminishing. I’m reasonably aware of literary concerns, so in that sense I think I write for an audience more like myself… . It's difficult to answer.

BW: That's good, though, because maybe before it was more like you were focusing on yourself primarily. Today, as you’ve pointed out, you are more aware of your larger audience. The primary audience might still be you, but you are still conscious of that broader audience. Would that be fair?

KS: Yes. I am aware of the potential implications of what I write to a much greater extent than I had been before. Sometimes I find it hard to be brave enough to trust and believe in the creative process, and to be prepared to fly in the face of apparently strategic or more overt political concerns and so forth, in the interest of what you can do with a story that other forms of discourse don't allow.