Sufi Poetry Is, In A Sense, Self-help

Sometimes We Are Looking For Somebody We Can Connect With On The Basis Of A Shared Past Or A Tradition Or Experience. And So Finding That You're Sitting Next To Someone Very Much Like You In Terms Of Where They Come From Is Enormously Reassuring.

You Know, You Get A Bad Review As A Writer, You Remember It For 10 Years. You Get A Hundred Good Reviews, You Forget Them All. You Say Hello To A Hundred People In The City And It Doesn't Mean Anything To You. One Racist Comment Passes By, And It Sticks With You A Decade.

I Think I've Always Been Drawn To The Second Person. When I Was Growing Up And Playing With My Friends, The Usual Way We Interacted With Imaginary Worlds Was As Characters: A Bench Was 'your' Boat, Leaves On A Lawn Were The Fins Of Sharks Out To Get 'you.'

For Me, Language Is About The Impossibility Of Communicating What We Precisely Wish To Communicate And This Gorgeous Attempt That We Make To Do That Anyway. I Love That We Will Never Say Exactly What We Mean, But We Will Forever Keep Trying.

The Anger Is Useful Too Because When Things About The World Upset You, That Is Really A Fertile Feeling To Channel Into Fiction And To Put Out Into Books.