It was a little harder when I first went to Egypt when I was 18 years old and being a white woman with a knapsack and in blue jeans. But again I was part of the rucksack revolution there was some grace there. You could put it that way. And confidence as well because I thought of myself as a poet. That was part of it. I was going for that, to have experiences to make the work.

I'm drawn to the magical efficacies of language as a political act.

I think of my father born in this very small, limited situation and then coming out of that. Many people have this story.

A lot of my life has involved with helping create cultures that have as their basis this vision of the sharing, the partaking of a certain ethos together.

Connection to Buddhism is strand in my life.

As a woman I have felt encouraged and fed by and nurtured by the work of [Jack] Kerouac and others.

Contemporary movies just drive me crazy. The violence and the sentimentality and the spiritual materialism and Theism and the incredible indulgence in ignorance is so claustrophobic.