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I grew up in a house where there was lots of teasing and language play and laughter; it was very important. When I was a teenager, you wouldn't go to a bar and find lots of televisions everywhere. People were talking. Talk was the mental fire you would gather around in the evening. It occupied a big part of your existence.

I write about people in small towns; I don't write about people living in big cities. My kind of storytelling depends upon people that have time to talk to each other.

It's a very immersive and intense form of travel to walk around with an interpreter and stop random people on the street and ask them about their lives.

I think any journalist who spends time in a place realizes that there are lots of stories around beyond their primary story. You meet so many interesting people and have all kinds of experiences.

I enjoy the crowds. It's not that hard to talk to them, to have fun with them.

The passion and knowledge of journalism as storytelling is incredibly infectious.

I like the storytelling and reading the letters, the long-distance dedications.

I love the community of theater. There is something about the camaraderie: People who show up eight times a week to do a show. It's unlike any other business. It's just lovely. You feel like you're in a family.

I grew up in Sierra Leone, in a small village where as a boy my imagination was sparked by the oral tradition of storytelling. At a very young age I learned the importance of telling stories - I saw that stories are the most potent way of seeing anything we encounter in our lives, and how we can deal with living.

There was a generation of people who moved here to make something of themselves. They had to really struggle and created really something on their own apart from a lot of attention. It was a really exciting time here.