1960s, a technique which involves total immersion into a character's life, experiences, habits and outlook, and parallels this propensity for in depth research. He has made links between this training and his approach to developing his fictional characters. In the case of his novel Bad Medicine, which includes a character who is a Native American medicine man, he spent a year with the Sioux People, and participated in traditional ceremonies. He advocates the development of writing technique through rigorous writing workshops, where emerging writers are guided by established writers, which he feels is a fast track to gaining a professional writing style. He attributes the emergence of a number of talented writers in the science fiction field to this process and also suggests that his own writing has been shaped by his participation these types of events, including the Milford Writer's Workshop. Since becoming an established writer, he has taught writing and run workshops on a regular basis. Genre He has written in multiple genres and has indicated that he enjoys and embraces the particular qualities and tropes of these genres, but does not see himself as confined to a particular genre when embarking on a writing project and may include aspects of a number of genres in a particular work. He views genres primarily as marketing categories, helping to guide readers towards fiction of interest to them and also useful in helping a writer to build up and sustain an audience for their work. His fiction typically challenges the divide between literary and speculative fiction and can show equal resonances of writers in both traditions. Themes Charisma, memory, myth, witnessing the reality of The Holocaust and transformation are all themes in Dann's work he has either identified himself or have been highlighted by reviewers and commentators. His stories often deal with achieving transcendent states, undertaking spiritual journeys or encountering confronting experiences that dramatically alter the psyche. Many involve young men who are liberated from naive origins by journeys marked by alien, revelatory or otherwise confrontational experiences which transform them, leaving them with a greater connection and awareness of their general environment or wider fields of consciousness. His first and second published novels, Starhiker and Junction and a significant number of his short stories are examples of this trend. He has linked this preoccupation with his experience of coming close to death as a young man, following his hospitalisation in