Too, some of my teachers helped me to navigate those books, showed me the maps and paths and secret decoder rings - people like Linda Kintz and Forest Pyle and Mary Wood and Diana Abu Jaber. They didn't treat me like a messy writer girl in combat boots who had infiltrated the smart people room. They treated me like I deserved to be there, potty mouth and all, they helped make a space for me to rage and ride my own intellect. That's why I'm saying their names out loud.

I look for the moment(s) in the story where the writer risked abandoning the glory of the self in favor of the possible relationship with an other. I don't ever let the market tell me what a memoir is. The first best memoir I ever read was Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.

We live through sound and light—through our technologies.

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.

Memoirs have at their heart a content that "happened" to someone in real life. Is that what you are itching at in your question, so that if you are a reviewer or you are writing a critique you might feel as if you are stepping on someone's actual face?

Only when I make movements away from the tribe of indie art and literature. Maybe that's something important for me to keep thinking about. What you gain, what you lose, why and how. Maybe the edge of the page is the place for me. Maybe that's OK.

I'm in love with language again because Luke B. Goebel is not afraid to take us back through the gullet of loss into the chaos of words. Someone burns a manuscript in Texas; someone's speed sets a life on fire; a heart is beaten nearly to death, the road itself is the trip, a man is decreated back to his animal past--better, beyond ego, beautiful, and look: there's an American dreamscape left. There's a reason to go on.