Stacey D'Erasmo

You can get anything online, including things that don't even exist. We've invented our own collective unconscious. The normal rules of time and space don't apply. It's held together by some other force than gravity. It's endless. It's like some unimaginably huge, messy novel that's writing itself both with and without us.

I was influenced by big, strong voices - writers like Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, Jane Bowles; gay writers like Ed White, Michael Cunningham, Allen Hollinghurst; and contemporary lesbian writers, like Dorothy Allison.

It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits.