If You Can Be Anything Else But

I Know California Isn't A Real Destination. You Can't Get There From New Jersey, Not Simply By Following A Line Drawn On A Map. The Process Of Arrival Is More Subtle And Complex. It Involves Acts Of Contrition. You Must Appease The Gods. You Must Find Novel Forms Of Penance. You Must Tattoo Your Children And Look At The Wonder. It's About Conjuring And Awakening And Intuitions You Wish You Never Had.

To Be One Woman, Truly, Wholly, Is To Be All Women. Tend One Garden And You Will Birth Worlds.

Writing Is Like Hunting. There Are Brutally Cold Afternoons With Nothing In Sight, Only The Wind And Your Breaking Heart. Then The Moment When You Bag Something Big. The Entire Process Is Beyond Intoxicating.

All My Friends Are Artists, So I Am Used To Collective Agony As A Mode.

They Will Say I Smoked Cigarettes And Marijuana, Cursed Hoarse As A Crow In All My Languages, And Loved Morphine And Demerol And Tequila And Pulque, Women And Men. I Will Shrug My Illusion Of Shoulders And Answer That I Am A Water Woman, Not A Vessel, Not Something You Can Sail Or Charter. I Am Instead The Tributary, The River, The Fluid Source, And The Sea Itself. I Am All Her Rainy Implications. And What Do You, With Your Rusted Compass, Know Of Love?