In 1980 I sent a play, 'Jitney,' to the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis, won a Jerome Fellowship, and found myself sitting in a room with sixteen playwrights. I remember looking around and thinking that since I was sitting there, I must be a playwright, too.
For myself, for a long time... maybe I felt inauthentic or something, I felt like my voice wasn't worth hearing, and I think everyone's voice is worth hearing. So if you've got something to say, say it from the rooftops.
When I feel risk-averse, I am much more likely to surround myself with middle-aged, professional, southern females; I just am.
I enjoy wearing fragrance every day and have found myself searching for the one signature scent that truly reflects my personality and the things I love, such as Bulgarian rose. I have always wanted to create a fragrance from its inception to fruition and articulate femininity, confidence, and fortitude.
I do consider myself a feminist, yeah. Totally.
I've looked at photographs of myself during concerts and it sometimes looks as if I'm in a fencing move, with a guitar in my hands instead of a sword.
Here's the problem: I don't like who I've become when my iPhone is within reach. I find myself checking e-mails and responding to texts throughout the day with some kind of Pavlovian ferocity - it's not a conscious act, but a reflexive one.
Part of the joy and pleasure of English is its boundless creativity: I can describe a new machine as bicyclish, I can say that I'm vitamining myself to stave off a cold, I can complain that someone is the smilingest person I've ever seen, and I can decide, out of the blue, that 'fetch' is now the word I want to use to mean 'cool.'
I love clothes. I can't control myself. I have a huge fetish for shoes and clothes and make-up. I'm the kind of person who doesn't like to wear things over and over again.
I'll be honest - I never saw myself making a ninja movie, never entertained the idea. I think ninja films can be quite cheesy unless you do them in feudal Japan.
Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.
It took two months from the day my fiance proposed to my first Google search for 'wedding planning: how?' Now, let me interrupt myself here and share how much I hate using the word 'fiance.' It's so fancy, and it's hard not to sound like a jerk saying it. Which is why I will be using my own word for fiance: gloob.
I constantly catch myself saying, ‘My fiancee, Linda. Wait no - wife.'
'Fiancee' is a very fun word to say, because I never thought I would have a fiancee or be a fiancee. Sometimes when I would introduce myself and say, 'This is my girlfriend Melanie,' it wasn't always clear what I meant. Now I get to say, 'This is my fiancee Melanie.'
For me, I never wore my religion on my sleeve, you know what I'm saying? I never put myself out there as Lupe Fiasco, he's Muslim, he's from Chicago, he likes to ride a skateboard.
The skating community is very fickle. And with me, they're especially fickle for whatever reason. Maybe I bring it on myself, but if you don't prove yourself and you don't skate consistently, then they can very easily write you off and bring somebody from behind you and put them in your place.
George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I'm 100 percent fiction writer... I don't want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don't state my political messages to anybody.
Everyone else thinks I'm a nonfiction writer. I think it's because my nonfiction is easier to find. But I write both in equal measure. I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself, and I get to make up the rules of the world that I'm writing.
By the time I wrote my memoir, 'Men We Reaped,' I had been running from writing it for a long time. When the events in the book were happening, I knew I'd probably write about them one day. I didn't want to. I'd studied fiction, and I was committed to establishing myself as a fiction writer first.
I actually very rarely see comedy myself, and although I admire the work of some comics, it does come from all over, so I'll get a charge out of some fiction writers and poets.
