Mary Doria Russell

The characters I'm most emotionally involved with are like friends you leave behind when you move away. You don't see them regularly anymore, but you still love them and keep in touch.

John Henry Holliday didn't have a mother to love him when he was grown, so I have taken him for my own. My fondest hope for Doc is that it will win for him the compassion and respect I think he deserves.

Who doesn't love a makeover? Even my husband watches 'What Not To Wear.'

I live and die with the Indians. The first game I attended back in the mid-'90s was almost a religious experience. We were down by six and won by two, and it was glorious. The stadium is so beautiful, and the way it frames the city when you're sitting high above the second base line is spectacular.

Instead of taking a year off, I started 'Dreamers of the Day' exactly 36 hours after I sent the manuscript for 'A Thread of Grace' to the publisher!

When we were 15, my girlfriend Ruth Kaplan and I applied to the Universidad Ibero-Americana in Mexico City. We were accepted into a program that placed us with a lovely Mexican family. We lived with them for six weeks while studying Spanish poetry and Mexican anthropology.

I had a doctorate in biological anthropology. I got a post-doc at CWRU dental school in 1983 teaching gross anatomy.