Katrina Fox chats English Author Jeanette Winterson

"The choices you make early on are crucial because you begin to develop a mindset which you carry on into life." English author Jeanette Winterson is explaining why she left home at 16 after being shunned by her evangelical family because she fell in love with another girl. "Either you're making a choice which is 'I am my own person, I will go forward however difficult', or you say 'No, it's too hard I'll stay where I am and make the best of it.' In later life you often hear people saying they feel trapped and there's nothing they can do about it, and this is because it's an accumulation of a lifetime's decision of turning away, of refusing the moment, of not taking the risk."

Winterson, best known for her novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, an account of a young girl's strict upbringing by Pentecostal parents in the north of England during the 1960s, is not one to mince her words - a quality that has earned her both praise and vilification in the press. "I'm very outspoken. If you're an outspoken woman you're always trouble because somehow you're not playing the game," she says. "The real connection as a writer is with the readers who come to your work because they want it and that for me is the most interesting bit because my books are where my true energies lie."

Her latest novel Lighthouse Keeping follows the tradition of previous works such as The Powerbook, Sexing the Cherry and Written on the Body in that it is rich in poetic language and spans different worlds and times. "We think of time in terms of the past, present and future but it really isn't so," she says. "Most people use the present either to go over what they have done or to rehearse what they will do, which is a great waste of the moment because the moment is all that we've got. In our imaginations we are free to roam, we can escape to other worlds." It's this concept that Winterson wants readers to get from her writing. "I want them to be excited by an imaginative journey, I want them to be seduced by the power of language, to realise that language is not an approximate or inadequate tool but that it is rich, varied, full of possibility and can both describe and transform our experience and thereby our world." It's not surprising then to learn that her writing process does not begin with a theme, plot or characters, but from a single sentence that she then has to unravel. "Things come to you - they have to, otherwise you just write something which is very formulaic as in creative writing school crap," she declares.

It's this kind of forthrightness that can get a person in trouble, but Winterson is not phased. When asked who she believes good female role models to be, she replies: "Well, not tennis players under 20. The cult of the juvenile sportswoman is a disaster. They can't talk and they can't think. Young women need role models who can think, talk and engage in the world." Such as? "All artists are good role models for young women," she says. Even Britney? "Well, I wouldn't call her an artist, I'd call her a pop figure. No, I think Britney Spears is ridiculous. Bjork would be a much better role model. I think Madonna's great because she's come through - she's a woman who's said 'This is what I want, I'm going to get it.' She's been through a hundred transformations but I think she's a real person. That's what you look for - somebody who is real and not a manufactured creature or one who has no values of their own."

For Winterson, this is the point of art. "Art is not about escapism, but confrontation," she asserts. "It's crucial for all of us to try and develop and maintain an inner imaginative life. If this is weak and withered you have no resources against the media. You are simply a consumer, a thing that can be manipulated. You have to have a value system of your own which acts as a counter influence to the current system, which is all about money, power and hype. I believe art by its nature is a different value system. Simply by what it is, it stands for a question mark against the rhetoric of capitalist culture."

It may all sound a bit heavy, but rest assured, there is a light side to Winterson, amply demonstrated as she recounts the time in her youth when she sold sex in return for saucepans. Although she rejects the terms 'gay' or 'lesbian' to describe her, Winterson has over the years had a penchant for women, especially married ones. "A lot of women I went to bed with when I was a young thing were married and living secret lives because they were afraid," she explains. "They wanted to give me presents but these presents were going on their husbands' credit cards so it had to be something that wouldn't cause a stir, so it couldn't be a pair of cowboy boots could it? But a saucepan was fine because the woman could say 'Darling I bought it for the kitchen'. So does Winterson still have any of these saucepans? "Oooh yes, I've got a fully equipped kitchen!" she laughs.

Nowadays Winterson keeps a house in London, but spends most of her time in the English countryside, sharing her passion for books with the public by maintaining a comprehensive website which is updated every month with a new column and poem. "I love my website," she enthuses. "A lot of young people use the web. I'm interested in being there for a new generation and I want it to be sexy and exciting, not have them thinking books are dull."

Lighthouse Keeping, Harper Collins, $27.95. More info visit www.jeanettewinterson.com

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