The odd thing is, that I wrote The Great Spring while I had cancer and it's not about cancer. It was after I was done with cancer that I wrote a book about it.

I love and care about literature, and great writers are our teachers. You're studying their mind when you read their work.

I write because I am alone and move through the world alone. No one will know what has passed through me... I write because there are stories that people have forgotten to tell, because I am a woman trying to stand up in my life... I write out of hurt and how to make hurt okay; how to make myself strong and come home, and it may be the only real home I'll ever have.

You don't need to go to a therapist, you don't need to do all kinds of things. If you want to write, you physically have to do it.

In writing practice, there's no direction. You enter your own mind and follow it where it takes you. We have a great need to connect with our own mind and our own true self. And all of us have a story to tell.

So even though I couldn't bear writing about cancer, I faced it every day.

Our bodies are garbage heaps: we collect experience, and from the decomposition of the thrown-out eggshells, spinach leaves, coffee grinds, and old steak bones out of our minds come nitrogen, heat, and very fertile soil. Out of this fertile soil bloom our poems and stories. But this does not come all at once. It takes time. Continue to turn over and over the organic details of your life until some of them fall through the garbage of discursive thoughts to the solid ground of black soil.