Hello I am Lily Tiller and I read your book Wolf brother in my grade English class. I loved it and it was very interesting and I was wondering what gave you the idea to mix natural and supernatural and who is your biggest inspiration in the writing community ?

Hello, Lily.  That’s a great question, and the answer is that mixing the two came naturally, from my research on how Torak’s people must have lived.  For details of that, see my answer to your classmate Andy, but in short, I knew from reading about how more recent indigenous people live that Torak’s people would probably have believed that everything in the world has a spirit: in other words, not just animals and people, but trees, rocks, mountains, rivers, even glaciers.  I built on that to imagine Torak’s world.  It was really hard to do, because I’m not someone who actually believes in spirits, or demons, so I had to keep imagining myself into Torak’s mind.  As for which other writers have inspired me, I think I’ve learnt something from lots of different writers over the years, so I can’t name anyone who stands out.  However when I was a child, I loved the stories of Jack London, particularly White Fang and The Call of the Wild.  With best wishes, Michelle