When Emily Dickinson writes, “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul,” she reminds us, as the birds do, of the liberation and pragmatism of belief.

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.

I think wherever we are, we can create an atmosphere of openness and trust, where women and those who feel marginalized feel safe to speak the truth of their lives.

How do we create beauty in a broken world? How do we create a view of sustainability in an economy that is crashing? How do we reconfigure our lives, how do we pick up the pieces and create a meaningful life? So, yes, we have a different form of leadership but the questions remain the same.

Well, we are Americans. I've always believed that you work with where you are - I am a Mormon woman who was raised on the edge of the Great Salt Lake in the American West in the United States of America. But, by the same token, much of my life has been spent resisting traditional forms of democracy, resisting traditional forms of orthodoxy, be it the United States government or the Mormon Church.

I don't set boundaries for myself when I am writing; if I did, I would be paralyzed from the start, unable to write a word on the page.

I am obsessed by the idea of silence. I went through an entire library studying art, artists and their critics, philosophers, too, on the meaning and significance of the color white. I dreamed of white birds and white bears. I thought about the white pages of my mother's journals. I became enthralled with John Cage and his work, 4'33”, his masterpiece of ambient sound. Rauschenberg, too. And then at some point I let go. What sticks to the soul is what gets placed on the page. Maybe that's the unknown part, the mystery, the power of the empty page.