I am not alone. Whatever else there was or is, writing is with me.

One thing about humans is that we all have them - lifestories. We live by and through them. But writers of memoir are particularly good at bringing literary strategies and form to experience (at least the good ones are).

I do have one regret though. I wish Kathy Acker was still alive. I wish I could go swim with her again. My literary indebtedness to her is enormous. She's a more important mother to me than anyone can possibly imagine. In language I became a daughter worth a crap because of her. In language I redefined daughter, woman, I became a writer. Dora is an homage of sorts.

I love the walking contradiction of the body. I want to make corporeal characters, corporeal writing, I want to bring the intensities and contradictions and beauty and violence and stench and desire and astonishing physicality of the body back into literature.

When someone says something dunderheaded to me about the material, it's usually a big neon sign revealing their own damage or ignorance, so my compassion kicks in.

Birth is of course violent. Menstruation is violent. Trust me, if men's penises opened up once a month and shot blood, we'd be hearing about the violence of it.

One of the reasons I love language is that concerning semiotics, language is an arbitrary sign system, which means the signs within it are free-floating, but we put them in a certain order to get them to have meaning for us. If we left them alone, they'd be like water, like the ocean. It would be just this vast field of free-floating matter or signs, so in this way, I think language and water have much in common. It's only us bringing grammar and syntax and diction and the human need for meaning that orders language, hierarchizes it.