Coming OUT ~ Ep. 222

HAPPY PRIDE!!!! There was a time when I felt like I was constantly coming out. Where I always felt the need to check people. Where I always made assumptions about people and people made assumptions about me. When you know better you do better. When I came out it was an exciting time for me.…

Things Will Unstitch Us…

Excerpts from Chris Abani's Ted Talk on Humanity: "This woman -- during the Biafran war, we were caught in the war. It was my mother with five little children. It takes her one year, through refugee camp after refugee camp, to make her way to an airstrip where we can fly out of the country.…

What makes life worthwhile?

"I'm always trying to write about the most important things that people do. The places in their lives where they feel the greatest stress, the places where they feel the greatest passion and how they deal with those things and how they survive them and make their lives go on. Being in love with somebody…

Balancing Vulnerability with Transformation

"African narratives in the West, they proliferate. I really don't care anymore. I'm more interested in the stories we tell about ourselves -- how as a writer, I find that African writers have always been the curators of our humanity on this continent. The question is, how do I balance narratives that are wonderful with…

Literature is a Gift from the Writer

"I don't like thinking that what I write comes from or is synonymous to a dream. I've heard writers speaking about novels as being extended dreams. I don't like that because dreams, to me, mean selfish gestures. I like the other notion that literature is a GIFT from the WRITER to the reader." ~ Richard…

When the words in a dream are loud

"So much of what we do in those hours when we're actually making sentences, inventing characters and feeling our way through the threads of a plot, is hunch and feel-half unconscious and somewhat autohypnotic. Those rituals of getting ready to write seem to conduce a kind of trance state. ...I am a poet of awareness…

You have to give everything away every single time!

Writers, we fear so many things. That we won't have what it takes. That we will run out of words. Perhaps that great idea should go in another book. "Often the writing process is filled with a sense of jeopardy because, in essence, with every book I turn myself inside out. One of the things…

There’s not a single second of my life when I’m not thinking story…

"So I don't keep a notebook of good lines, good thoughts or dreams. I have too many stories in my head rather than too few. Until very recently I had to grab whatever time I could because I worked at one full-time job, three part-time jobs and so on. When I was ready to sit…

Messages, Dreams & Omens

"So much of what I do is unconscious. I choose not to dissect why certain images appear when I'm writing. I just let them lead and take me where they will. I attempt to make connections. I often feel that my connections are just as good as someone else's in that regard. Because, when the…

Inspiration & Dreams

On inspiration coming from our experiences and our dreams... "I dreamed that's how it would happen for my protagonist: she would see a man in the middle of a jailbreak and, by his eyes, no him totally. No his fear and his terror and know that they were her own. The whole thing became alive…