The American way is that you should always know what you're doing. You've made a decision and you should stick with it. But the fact is that no writer knows what they're doing until they've done it. The way that you get to the miracle of writing is bird by bird.
Alice feels betrayed by her own mind for a lot of the book. Um when I started the novel, I did it, too. And the reason why the prose is kind of jarred and chaotic and it's crammed with references that feel like they're about to spill over and just explode, that's because that's what living in her mind is like and what living in my mind was like.
I do think the purpose of life is exploration. So, how could answers to the unknowable questions of the universe from a from an advanced species, how could that not be catnip? How could you not want to go? But my life as a writer has been about exploration here. How could I not stay?
It's hard to tell people about grief. It's hard to talk to people about poverty... and so I'd got very used to the silence in my own life, and my writing is the only thing that allows me to connect with myself.
When that sentence comes into my life, whether I'm reading it to teach, whether I'm rereading it to write, whether I'm reading it out loud, even just now, tears always spring to my eyes.
I literally loved writing from the very first time I read Nikki Giovanni's poetry. Loved it. And for me, one of the most powerful things about Nikki Giovanni is she made the ordinary so beautiful.
I literally loved writing from the very first time I read Nikki Giovanni's poetry. Loved it... I could smell the lotion between my grandmother's legs when she would braid my hair when I read Nikki Giovanni. Like, I love that. I wanna write like that.
Creativity and talent and drive are not the only things that make authors. Writing is something that requires quite a lot of time and time is very expensive and the piece that you need to have that time is expensive.
I really want to give them the most amount of swoon as I can. I want people to read these quieter moments that are the louder moments in the book, but quieter moments in real life and be able to relate them back and think that was really romantic when my partner did that for me.
