I'm curious about other universes, and nonhuman elementals. For me it's still a very lively ethos. It's a kind of practice. It's an ethos that is very sustaining.

Various random experiments, cut-ups, fold-ins, juxtapositions, timed writings of other kinds, the "objects assignment" which involves dream, adventure, ancestry. Writing outside, writing on moving vehicles. Looking at paintings in the grand museums of the world in a proscribed way.Little strategies to keep the lalita - play or dance - going. Sometimes it's lonely you know, just you and your own imagination.

My mother actually left American in 1929 to be part of an alternative community of bohemians around her then father-in-law who was a well-known Greek poet. This group of people were living in this semi-Luddite reality and weaving their own clothes - proto-hippies in a way- -but around an artistic vision.

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

I had parents who were attentive to what was going on politically. There was the Greek connection, a sense of a larger world. People coming in from abroad. There was a sense of community around ideas: a discourse and an adhesiveness which is my favorite word from [Walt] Whitman.

I did go to Vietnam in 2000 as a kind of pilgrimage and to feel my generation was very much a part of this. I felt responsible but also connected and empathetic. It was a very complicated relationship we had, whichever side you were on. The shock of being there was very few people my own age - I was primarily in the North in the streets of Hanoi. A whole generation was essentially decimated.

For me there is a poesis, a poetics, around the trope of the road that is embedded within many life experiences of the people I've been close to.