We live through sound and light—through our technologies.

Fiction and poetry expose intimate things from a person's life every bit as much as memoir does, and sometimes more. I don't quite see or live the distinction you are making about the forms.

Have endless patterns and repetitions accompanying your thoughtlessness, as if to say let go of that other more linear story, with its beginning, middle, and end, with its transcendent end, let go, we are the poem, we have come miles of life, we have survived this far to tell you, go on, go on.

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

As far as being territorial about one's own life, that's a mistake for ANY writer. All writers everywhere, in every genre, are drawing from their life and the lives of those around them for "material." Memoirs just make transparent and even amplify that activity.

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.

Certainly I'm participating in an already established and awesome tradition, but it's a tradition that sort of shoots up and through the mainstream in short bursts and pulses and then gets diluted. Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson shot up and then got sucked back down underground under more entertaining and less radical versions of body and self - poetry and prose that posited bodies in more perfect union with good citizenship.