Every great moment of social change was once a confirmed impossibility. People's determination in the face of overwhelming odds has, time and again, triumphed over what seems impossible. This is what you tell yourself.

I've been a writer and a parent since adolescence, it feels like, and I'm still making both gigs up as I go along. I did both in different forms of isolation - too young by conventional standards, too far off-grid culturally and geographically. So my experience is probably too specific to be useful. None of us do this stuff the same way. We just try to endure and press on, I guess.

It's terrifying to think you can remember things you shouldn't possibly be able to. It's like that childhood fear of having your soul slip from your body in your sleep. The darkness, those black sheets of glass sliding over you, upping the pressure, pushing you through the time and space and story.

The blank page doesn't bother me. It's the voice in my head (not always my own) that gives me the yips. It's worse when I'm not making stuff up.

Life is wild by definition. And organic existence is violent. Though I find this hard to accept. And I know it goes against the cultural grain of therapeutic smoothing so dominant in what we like to call 'cultural discourse'.

The desert is a spiritual place, we vaguely understand, and the sea the mere playground of our hedonism.

I liked books - the respite and privacy of them - books about plants and the formation of ice and the business of world wars. Whenever I sank into them I felt free.