Novelist · Short Story Writer
What I have done in my career is just try to assess who we are, what we are, why we are here, and how come we, as animals, are able to walk around and wear pants and dresses and talk on the internet, while the other animals are not. It's been my obsession since I was young. I think if I hadn't become a novelist, I might have been happy to be a naturalist or a field biologist.
Novelist · Short Story Writer
What I have done in my career is just try to assess who we are, what we are, why we are here, and how come we, as animals, are able to walk around and wear pants and dresses and talk on the internet, while the other animals are not. It's been my obsession since I was young. I think if I hadn't become a novelist, I might have been happy to be a naturalist or a field biologist.
Edgar Award-winning Author of The House of Love and Death
True Crime dir. Clint Eastwood · Don’t Say a Word starring Michael Douglas
Journalist & Podcast Host
I think that the modern sensibility and certainly the post-modern sensibility tells us that everything is self-referential. That if we have a certain feeling, it's because of our chemistry, it's because of our sexuality or urges that come within ourselves. But the older way of thinking is that we're in a relationship with a world that actually is reflected in our mind. And I think that that older sensibility is probably closer to the truth. It explains a lot more. It makes a lot more sense of things.
So every writer knows this, that he's not actually drawing so much from himself as some kind of literal inspiration, some kind of breathing into him that connects him, his own experiences, his childhood experiences, life experiences, his mental experiences with something that is very real outside him. And what he's trying to do in art, I think, is communicate that experience to other people in the only way possible. You can't describe it, you can't put adjectives into it. You have to dramatize it or paint a picture of it or write a song about it. That's the way human beings communicate the experience of being human.
Edgar Award-winning Author of The House of Love and Death
True Crime dir. Clint Eastwood · Don’t Say a Word starring Michael Douglas
Journalist & Podcast Host
I think that the modern sensibility and certainly the post-modern sensibility tells us that everything is self-referential. That if we have a certain feeling, it's because of our chemistry, it's because of our sexuality or urges that come within ourselves. But the older way of thinking is that we're in a relationship with a world that actually is reflected in our mind. And I think that that older sensibility is probably closer to the truth. It explains a lot more. It makes a lot more sense of things.
So every writer knows this, that he's not actually drawing so much from himself as some kind of literal inspiration, some kind of breathing into him that connects him, his own experiences, his childhood experiences, life experiences, his mental experiences with something that is very real outside him. And what he's trying to do in art, I think, is communicate that experience to other people in the only way possible. You can't describe it, you can't put adjectives into it. You have to dramatize it or paint a picture of it or write a song about it. That's the way human beings communicate the experience of being human.
Dayton Literary Peace Prize Winning Novelist, Poet & Clinical Psychologist
We become the stories we tell ourselves…I started writing around the time I learned English because we moved to the States soon after my fourth birthday, and so I was here for kindergarten into elementary school. I grasped this new language just as I was learning how to also put things onto the page. Those two things really happened at the same time for me. I entered this world where I felt very different and very other, for all intents and purposes I was set to be raised in Kuwait. And then that of course got turned upside down after the invasion by Saddam. I think that so much of my trying to make sense of the world had to do with the displacement, exile and these experiences that my parents had experienced but then that I had as well as we were fleeing the war. It’s hard to know because I think that language was being formed in my brain at the same time that these things were happening.
Dayton Literary Peace Prize Winning Novelist, Poet & Clinical Psychologist
We become the stories we tell ourselves…I started writing around the time I learned English because we moved to the States soon after my fourth birthday, and so I was here for kindergarten into elementary school. I grasped this new language just as I was learning how to also put things onto the page. Those two things really happened at the same time for me. I entered this world where I felt very different and very other, for all intents and purposes I was set to be raised in Kuwait. And then that of course got turned upside down after the invasion by Saddam. I think that so much of my trying to make sense of the world had to do with the displacement, exile and these experiences that my parents had experienced but then that I had as well as we were fleeing the war. It’s hard to know because I think that language was being formed in my brain at the same time that these things were happening.
Novelist, Poet & Activist
People who take care of sick people and AIDS and teachers and garbage collectors and people who work in daycare…all the things that have to happen in society we pay shit for. We pay an enormous amount of money to people who can throw a ball through a hoop. We pay an enormous amount of hedge fund people. All the people who take over corporations go in and destroy get immensely rich while the people who do what we actually need doing, what we must have to survive, the people who grow food, the independent farmers that used to exist…
Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet
Author of The Tradition & The New Testament
I just want to make the poems like a living being…There are moments that I’m not at the desk, but I’m living life. And living life is actually what leads to writing. You have to have experiences to write about. Whether or not you are aware of those experiences as you are writing them down because if you’re doing music first, maybe you’re not aware of what you’re writing. And yet, those experiences are what come to fruition in your writing. You become aware. Oh, I did come on that roller coaster that time that I haven’t thought about in twenty years. Oh I did make love to that cute person that I haven’t thought about in ten years, but you’ve got to make love, you’ve got to get on roller coasters, you’ve got to get your heart broken. You’ve got to dance. You gotta get out and do things and that, too, is a part of writing. You have to trust you’re a writer by identity. And if you can trust that you’re a writer by identity, then you don’t have to be at a desk.
Award-winning Memoirist & Poet
The Magical Language of Others · A Lesser Love
I had delayed speech, and I had quite a bit of trouble with speaking. I think I must have been five before I was uttering some of my first words and trying to articulate. Simple communication was very difficult for me and my family, especially in a family where we were speaking several languages. They hoped to instill English. It’s the language of survival. There was a lot of frustration and fear in my relationship to language, and the relationship these languages had to each other, that was something I felt very sensitive to since I was young. Since before I could speak.
T.S. Eliot Award-winning Poet, Novelist & Musician, Lead vocalist of The Spasm Band
Author of Sonnets for Albert
The life of Caribbean people is not really documented. So this idea of Caribbean life being fragmented is something that I've had in my mind for a long time. So when I came to write this collection for my father, I realized that it was the same process and what I had were fragments, especially with him, because he wasn't around in a physical sense all the time. So all I had were little photographs, scattered memories, and remembrances. They're little parts of his life and parts of my experience with him... I never disliked my father. I always loved him and always was fascinated and captivated by him.
U.S. Poet Laureate · Host of The Slowdown podcast
This poem was written when I was having a real moment of reckoning, not that I hadn't had it earlier, but where I was doing some deep reading about the climate crisis and really reckoning with myself, with where we were and what was happening, what the truth was. And I felt like it was so easy to slip down into a darkness, into a sort of numbness, and I didn't think that that numbness and darkness could be useful.
NYTimes Bestselling Author of Nothing More to Tell, One of Us is Lying
Well, I had a wonderful teacher in second grade who kind of inspired me to start writing and really stuck with me through elementary school and beyond as I made attempts to find my voice, but think part of the reason it never really went anywhere for me as a young person was because I was too afraid to share that with anyone except for that one teacher. I never showed friends. I didn't even really show family. I just always felt that it wasn't quite good enough. And so the thing I always tell writers now if they ask for, you know, "What's one tip?" It's let someone else tell you no, because I just told myself no for pretty much my entire young adulthood. And once I let other people tell me no, they did a lot, you know, but that is how I got better.
NYTimes Bestselling Author of Nothing More to Tell, One of Us is Lying
Well, I had a wonderful teacher in second grade who kind of inspired me to start writing and really stuck with me through elementary school and beyond as I made attempts to find my voice, but think part of the reason it never really went anywhere for me as a young person was because I was too afraid to share that with anyone except for that one teacher. I never showed friends. I didn't even really show family. I just always felt that it wasn't quite good enough. And so the thing I always tell writers now if they ask for, you know, "What's one tip?" It's let someone else tell you no, because I just told myself no for pretty much my entire young adulthood. And once I let other people tell me no, they did a lot, you know, but that is how I got better.
Award-winning Poet, Novelist & Musician, Lead vocalist of The Spasm Band
Author of Sonnets for Albert
The life of Caribbean people is not really documented. So this idea of Caribbean life being fragmented is something that I've had in my mind for a long time. So when I came to write this collection for my father, I realized that it was the same process and what I had were fragments, especially with him, because he wasn't around in a physical sense all the time. So all I had were little photographs, scattered memories, and remembrances. They're little parts of his life and parts of my experience with him... I never disliked my father. I always loved him and always was fascinated and captivated by him.
Author of Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils · Anthropocene Poetics
Professor of Literature & the Environment · University of Edinburgh.
Just thinking about how our actions play out over multiple generations who will have to live with the consequences of these decisions. I think we need to stretch our sense of time, and within that stretch our sense of empathy. The philosopher Roman Krznaric talks about that in his book The Good Ancestor, that we need a more elastic sense of empathy that can encompass not just those close to us or living alongside us, but those who have yet to be born will have to inherit the world that we passed down to them. But I think in stretching that sense of empathy and stretching that sense of the times that we touch, if you like, because all of us are engaged in activities that will lead long legacies, long tails, in terms of the fossil fuels we're consuming. And so, alongside that, I think we need to accept that the time we live in is a strange one, and time itself is doing strange things in the anthropocene.
Author of Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils · Anthropocene Poetics
Professor of Literature & the Environment · University of Edinburgh.
Just thinking about how our actions play out over multiple generations who will have to live with the consequences of these decisions. I think we need to stretch our sense of time, and within that stretch our sense of empathy. The philosopher Roman Krznaric talks about that in his book The Good Ancestor, that we need a more elastic sense of empathy that can encompass not just those close to us or living alongside us, but those who have yet to be born will have to inherit the world that we passed down to them. But I think in stretching that sense of empathy and stretching that sense of the times that we touch, if you like, because all of us are engaged in activities that will lead long legacies, long tails, in terms of the fossil fuels we're consuming. And so, alongside that, I think we need to accept that the time we live in is a strange one, and time itself is doing strange things in the anthropocene.
Author of The Stoic Challenge & A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy
Happiness is another interesting thing. I've been thinking about this lately. You know, people take aim at happiness. I don't know if you can actually do that, if you can have a recipe for attaining happiness. Happiness is something that just happens as a byproduct of something else going on in your life, and that is having a day where you're experiencing equanimity. You don't have this abundance of negative emotions, where you value the things you've already got, where you value the relationships you've got, where you feel good inside your own body. You like being who you are. And I think, if all that happens, then suddenly, you know, it'll dawn on me. 'Gosh, I guess I'm happy...'
Author of The Stoic Challenge & A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy
Happiness is another interesting thing. I've been thinking about this lately. You know, people take aim at happiness. I don't know if you can actually do that, if you can have a recipe for attaining happiness. Happiness is something that just happens as a byproduct of something else going on in your life, and that is having a day where you're experiencing equanimity. You don't have this abundance of negative emotions, where you value the things you've already got, where you value the relationships you've got, where you feel good inside your own body. You like being who you are. And I think, if all that happens, then suddenly, you know, it'll dawn on me. 'Gosh, I guess I'm happy...'
Claudia Forestieri (Creator) & Brigitte Muñoz-Liebowitz (Showrunner)
Gordita Chronicles
When you immigrate, it's kind of like you're going through adolescence because you're in a new place. You feel weird in your own skin. You're learning new things. Everything is changing. You feel awkward. So that also helped us connect the adult stories to the children's stories.
Claudia Forestieri (Creator) & Brigitte Muñoz-Liebowitz (Showrunner)
Gordita Chronicles
When you immigrate, it's kind of like you're going through adolescence because you're in a new place. You feel weird in your own skin. You're learning new things. Everything is changing. You feel awkward. So that also helped us connect the adult stories to the children's stories.
