`I was never a child, ' asserts K.D. Miller, author of two collections of short fiction from The Porcupine's Quill. `Or at least, the child in me was ``killed'' sometime before my conscious memory kicks in.' No particular traumatic event or series of events brought this about, Miller says. In fact, her childhood sounds boringly routine. Miller grew up in Hamilton, Ontario in the 1950's world of housewives and breadwinners, of pink plastic radios in the kitchen and workbenches in the basement, of fathers who hardly spoke and mothers who couldn't stop talking. All of this finds its way into her stories, along with the feeling `of being different, of not quite fitting in, of being here on sufferance, ' and the distinct sense that `the world could be a dark and menacing place.'

In `The Other Voice', the story that begins Give Me Your Answer, the child witnesses the aftermath of a car accident in which a child was hit, maybe killed. She can tell that the woman who `sings' about how sad it is isn't sad at all, more gloating at the punishment meted out to errant child and careless adult, both `getting what's coming to them' in an Old Testament, righteous kind of way. The `other voice' of the title is the little girl's own voice, blunt with reality, almost unrecognized as her own, that gives the lie to the innocence of children.

Of her influences Miller says, `I've always been attracted to anything Gothic. As a child I must have read Jane Eyre about eleven times, and I was morbidly fascinated by the works of Poe. I still love the southern Gothic writers: Eudora Welty ... Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor.' Margaret Laurence was an early, powerful influence. `When I first began to think of myself as a writer, I got cartloads of permission from Margaret Laurence. Permission to write, permission to think of myself as a writer, permission to pause and dwell on what is small and ordinary.' Miller remembers reading Laurence's A Bird in the House and suddenly realizing it was all right to write about everyday things, `the way the light came in the mother's window, ' and make it special. And indeed Miller's stories are full of the small details that render an ordinary scene significant.