I came out with a book called The True Secret of Writing: Connecting Life with Language. It's a book that describes how writing is a practice and how my teaching is part of that practice. I direct the writing and create books but underneath, there's always the river of practice happening. No good, no bad. Just do it.

The problem is we think we exist.

poems are small moments of enlightenment

We are searching for the core of our lives; our culture intuits that writing, that ancient activity, might be the pathway...Awakening does not feed ego's needs and desires; it pulverizes the self. Our society couldn't knowingly bear such reduction, so we've tricked ourselves into the same path but call it writing.

Actually, every time we begin, we wonder how we did it before, Each time is a new journey with no maps.

One poem or story doesn't matter one way or the other. It's the process of writing and life that matters.

I had cancer for fourteen months and wrote a memoir about the experience.