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Novelist Darcey Steinke will read portions of her works on July 31 as part of the Hammer Museum's

Having recently published her novel, “Milk,” Darcey Steinke decided to take a brief vacation with her daughter off the coast of Connecticut.

“You don’t have a lot of days like this out there, do you? You know, where it’s hot, but not sunny, kind of wet, and it’s just that buggy, buggy weather?” she asked during a phone interview.

Thankfully, Los Angeles will likely have sunny skies and bug-free weather on Sunday when Steinke comes to the Hammer Museum to read from “Milk” and speak about some of her recent work.

Steinke’s previous novels, “Suicide Blonde,” “Up Through Water” and “Jesus Saves” established her as a prose writer with a poetic style, and often her books have themes of sexual and spiritual enlightenment. “Milk” follows a priest, a former monk and a mother, as they struggle with loneliness and the meaning of life, but it was originally conceived a bit differently.

“With ‘Milk,’ I wanted to write an erotic novel,” Steinke said. “But with my novels they never turn out the way I wanted them to turn out, and that’s the key. There has to be some discovery in the writing process, or the reader won’t discover anything that’s unknown.”

For Steinke, discovery through writing has been a lifelong interest. Yet it took some time to realize that this interest would become a lifelong profession. Steinke remembers writing at a young age, even completing a novel in high school. She continued to take writing classes in college as well. Despite this passion, Steinke says she worried about the necessity of a stable profession and considered being a lawyer or professor.

“At the end of college, my professors Madison Smart Bell and Beth Spires really encouraged me and they told me, ‘You can do this. If you work really hard,’” Steinke said.

With that advice, after graduating from Goucher College, Steinke attended graduate school at Stanford and the University of Virginia.

“When I sold my first book, it was like, I guess this is what I’m going to do!” Steinke said.

Since her breakout novel “Up Through Water,” Steinke has kept writing. She even started teaching college students at Columbia University and The New School. She has become a mentor to students who are as unsure as she once was, trying to find the key to good writing.

“I tell my students to work every day, even if it’s just writing letters. The process is the thing that is going to express where everything comes from,” Steinke said.

Steinke’s practice of writing every day helps keep severe writer’s block at bay, and allows her to formulate ideas for new novels.

As her writing has matured, Steinke has gained the confidence to explore a number of different subjects in her novels, including theology.

She comes from a family whose history is entrenched in religion – her father, five uncles and grandfather are all ministers – and incorporates elements of religion in “Milk,” especially in the character of Walter, a gay Episcopal priest.

“What I like best in characters is their urge to do good and live in harmony with God, but sometimes they mess up,” Steinke said.

Along with her curiosity toward religion and her past, Steinke is often recognized for the sex and violence in her novels.

“When I don’t have two things going against each other, it is harder for me to figure out what I’m trying to write about. I really enjoy writing about sex and violence, but I feel that it is rarely done well in literary novels, so it is something I enjoy writing about,” she said.

Steinke writes frequently and prolifically, weaving her fascination with religion, sex and violence into novels, publications like Bomb Magazine and The Washington Post, and a nonlinear fictional short story on the Internet called Blindspot. Yet she mainly attributes her success to her strong work ethic.

“There really are no writing secrets; it’s basically just hard work,” said Steinke.