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I vividly remember my sixth-grade classroom. I remember what it smelled like, where I sat, what I could see out the window, and how I felt about things. Peel away my decrepit middle-aged exterior, and an important part of me is still twelve years old. It helps me when I sit down to write stories for kids.

I'm always trying to figure out ways to keep hold of memories. My one-sentence journal, for instance.

I wanted to put all my family stories down for my girls, and I remember everything so vividly. I just wanted to put everything down while I still can remember it all.

I remember that as I was writing a poem on 'Snow' when I was eight, I said aloud, 'I wish I could have the ability to write down the feelings I have now when I am little, because when I grow up, I will know how to write, but I will have forgotten what being little feels like.'

When I was young, I kept a diary for about 10 years and I had to write in it every day. Even on days when nothing seemed to happen, I made myself think of something to put in it.

I don't write down my experiences, but I have a very decent memory. I have tons of books in which I write down phrases as they occur to me. That's how I write songs. I'll need a line and I'll go through the books and find it, the right rhyme and everything.

I've been working on my autobiography, just pecking away in longhand. The more you write, the more you remember. The more you remember, the more detail you recall. It's not all pleasant!

When I was a kid, a pickleball hit me in the back of the head, and I had memory problems. I was in a boarding school and the nuns gave me poems to remember to try and get the memory going again.

When I was 21, I got into a motorcycle accident while traveling in Europe and I had to lie around a lot in the aftermath, which was really the first time in my life that I became really focused and inspired to write.