The rocks. They carry the chronology of water. All things simultaneously living and dead in your hands.

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.

Poetry, for example, goes so deeply into the space between corporeal affect and deep emotion (even primal in some cases) that, as Emily Dickinson said, it can blow the top of your head off. Poetic language is sometimes misunderstood as "abstract" when in reality, it's precise - precisely the language of emotions and the body.

I just want my stories to be mine.

Your life doesn’t happen in any kind of order. Events don’t have cause and effect relationships the way you wish they did. It’s all a series of fragments and repetitions and pattern formations. Language and water have this in common.

Sometimes saviors look different than you thought they would.

I'm kind of still down with Virg Woolf on this one: "women must kill the aesthetic ideal through which they themselves have been 'killed' into art."