If you silence yourself, if you try to be good, if you try to be polite, or toe a party line, you end up paying for that in the long run. You pay for it... with your homeland, or with your soul, or with your artistic vision.

I honestly never intended food to occupy so much of my creative work. Food-writing often seems about to plummet straight into sentimentality. I think food can be dangerous to write about because if you don't manage to mediate it somehow, it can be the worst sort of greeting card.

I'm constantly at war with myself to quit goofing around, and the internet hasn't helped that any. I've learned that I have to be sort of exploitive about seizing moments to write. Luckily, I still write most of my first drafts by hand, so I often work in bed when I can't sleep.

My heritage will always be an element in my work but as I've written, traveled, and lived more, I've found that the questions and the search - for meaning, for home, for tribe - consume me more than trying to crank out one identity or one homeland.

Consider the difference between the first and third person in poetry [...] It's like the difference between looking at a person and looking through their eyes.