Laughter can shake you from the delirium of grief

Underneath the forms of fiction and poetry, you can bet your ass the ground comes from someone's actual life experience.

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.

The practice of employing metaphor and image and composition and linguistic choices to move the reader through the content.

I might think that equality has been achieved, there is no power relation going on in terms of class, race, or gender, I might just want to drink my latte and buy pretty shoes and write books about girls who marry, die, or go insane, then go get my nails done.

Aspiration gets stuck in some people. It's difficult to think yes. Or up. When all you feel is fight or run.