There are writers I know who never tell anyone when they travel that they are writers. People say what do you write. Why dont we like that. Or they say I always wanted to be a writer. Their eyes get kind of dreamy like the way photographers who take your picture are waiting for you to look. People think that you go to beautiful places to write and youre just living the life. And it’s actually true. The part that sucks is that you're writing. 28

Ideally I wrote with a nice thick runny pen, a rolling writer, originally a pentel. It’s moved on to being a Pilot G-2 10 otherwise known as bold. I like fine you might say. Well I pity you. 43

What am I reading lately. Tristram Shandy which is foolish and rhythmic and the Koran which is ecstatic and smart. I was sitting on the plane the other day reading the Koran. That felt great. The first section is called the heifer though I don’t know why yet. 46

Around fifty I became a college professor. It came and bit me on the ass. 47

I remember every poem I ever wrote. I can’t recite them but they come back like waves because they are t of my brain. They are how I have a brain. 47 brain is inside out. Poetry proves me. 48 47-48

65-68

What I wonder a lot is why everyone who reads doesn't start writing at some point. It just seems like the obvious nervous response. 67

69 Finally! An answer to the question! At least she answered it! Patti Smith didn’t!

Writing is really a crime! If so many things in the book like the dog talking and the puppets talking were in fact an invention, a kind of giving that refers to the true thing you ultimately get to espouse in a dream (art) instead of being burdened with having to assure everyone of its veracity (business, news) which we all know now and generally have begun to assume is a lie. Or just an energetic shove of any kind that’s purporting to be information. What I mean is that if the puppets are fiction and so is my dog then I can be fiction too. For one brief hairy moment it's not "my writing" cause I’m not real, I’m alive. In my writing! 71

Reversing the in and the out. And that’s what I want a lot or most in writing. It’s when I’m alive. It’s not my writing. I’m a puppet. But my own. My own puppet. I think I’ve made it clear that I never wanted to be a writer. Because I hadn’t seen one before! It partly explains the phenomenon of the book Little Women. There’s a female writer inside and outside the book. It proposes for a moment that the female writer is real. 72

...I discovered that to be real was an interior project. The actions you felt inside, the stabs and constant pedaling, practiced and eventually moving out into the world like this thing that I'm writing are the eventual visible practice and it sounds like me and it looks like me changing shape for a very long time and then voila a book. It's a whole other thing to become a person but that’s not what I’m talking about here. That’s not what I was asked.
And my whole way of doing this therefore is laden with the ambition for the product to have a lot of world in it, be a little humble messy and dirty, so that people can enter like they walk into a building, a public building that is there since once I’m done it’s theirs. I vanish into it first but then you do too.
I guess it’s "my writing" but really it’s a common practice. That’s my dream. 73

76-77

I began writing to have some space, some privacy and the end result is all those years of thoughts and desires and worries and feelings being baldly open to the world. 82