Style is like voice, it grows organically from the truth of one's own life experience. Not in terms of chapters, per se, but in terms of stories. It is the story itself that creates an inherent structure.

As a writer, I have learned that each time I pick up my pencil I betray someone.

We are aching to come together and I think it has little to do with liberal or conservative discourse. I think it has to do with increasing disconnection with what is real and soul-serving.

My family lives all around me. We see each other daily. It's very, very complicated. I think that families hold us together and they split us apart.

When we really need to work hard to make sure that these ideas about constructive social change culturally, ecologically and politically, come to pass. And that's only going to happen if people support the leadership, because the same power structures are still in place, and it's not in their best interests to change.

And so we polish our own lives, creating landscapes and canyons and peaks with the very silt we try to avoid, the dirt we disavow or hide or deny. It is the dirt of our lives—the depressions, the losses, the inequities, the failing grades in trigonometry, the e-mails sent in fear or hate or haste, the ways in which we encounter people different from us—that shape us, polish us to a heady sheen, make us in fact more beautiful, more elemental, more artful and lasting.

I wonder, What is it to be human? Especially now that we are so urban. How do we remember our connection with place? What is the umbilical cord that roots us to that primal, instinctive, erotic place? Every time I walk to the edge of this continent and feel the sand beneath my feet, feel the seafoam move up my body, I think, "Ah, yes, evolution." It's there, we just forget.