In my own life, I believe it was an early education in poetical metaphor that helped me to grapple with and make sense of all the difficult and traumatic things that were to come.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I think it was the ability of the theater to communicate ideas and extol virtues that drew me to it. And also, I was, and remain, fascinated by the idea of an audience as a community of people who gather willingly to bear witness.
I can't remember why or how I started writing, but I think it was always a way of making sense of the world.
I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.
It was the enchantment of spoken verse that led me to write for children.
The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.
In my late teenage years, I developed a real passion for it, and wrote a lot of poetry.
Writing poetry, which for me was then saying how I felt about this and that, didn't help me to understand the world I lived in.
When my family fell apart, it was such a troubled part of my life... I think I could understand what I was going through, but I didn't have the vocabulary for it.
I had very literal parents and I wanted to survive with metaphor and art, and there was a real sense of shame around it.
It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience.