I honestly never understood how violence against women became a women's issue. 95 percent of the violence men are doing to women.

In America, we have to really be working on two fronts right now. Immediately, we have to be rising in resistance and protecting our Muslim brothers and sisters [and] every marginalized person under threat and siege. At the same time, we have to be planning and envisioning where we're going. How we build moments and movements, how we come up with the vision we want of a progressive left - that's what comes in after.

I think being an activist and an artist is an interesting contradiction, because so often they are at odds with one another. When you write as an artist you have to clean the palate of your own politics in creating characters and activism is kind of the exact opposite.

Real security is contemplating death, not pretending it doesn't exist.

The devastation of neoliberalism is so multi-fold, whether it's violence against women or desperate economic inequality or the destruction of the planet.

With the Gulf spill, I absolutely merged in the time when I had that infection. I couldn't get out of the Gulf spill. There were so many similarities: the drains and the siphoning and the tubes. And also in the way the earth was hurt, the ocean was bleeding. Remember the video cams of the oil gushing? I couldn't stop watching that.

For many years now, I feel like my own body struggle has been linked and connected with women I meet in the world. I think we're in this together.