“What I do want to explain is what my hunger was generative of. What looks from the outside like self-destruction isn’t always so. The other side of destruction is always the possibility of self-expression. Creativity. The mistake we make with teens and young adults and broken adults is to forget that. All creativity has destruction as its other …
What I saw in literary books was a possible path from suffering and self-destruction to self-expression. I went back to the nutso gibberish I wrote down in that notebook under the overpass, and I began to cull the stories.
Once I started writing I never stopped. For this reason I would say that the death of my daughter and entering a real place called psychosis and being homeless were not just tragic. They were generative. Those experiences put writing into my hands.
… Thirty years later the quality of my sadness has changed so radically that I can only understand it as pure creativity. In every book I have ever written there is a girl. And there always will be. Beyond forever, since I no longer believe in linear time. Into star stuff.”
“… If you are one of those people who has the ability to make it down to the bottom of the ocean, the ability to swim the dark waters without fear, the astonishing ability to move through life’s worst crucibles and not die, then you also have the ability to bring something back to the surface that helps others in a way that they cannot achieve themselves.”