Well I'm not a storyteller, as far as telling stories which relate to experiences in my own life. That's not what I do. I write songs which have a narrative and attempt to make sense and tell a story - sure! But whenever I hear the word "storyteller" I think of a children's musician.
I was left with myself and had to do the one thing I could to survive. I knew it would be difficult to write, very difficult, but I set about doing it.
Make lists. Write down the things that give you power. Write down the things that take your power away also. Make lists of people close to you. Are you associations raising you to a higher level of attention?
One of the wonderful things about the computer is that it allows us to sit at home and either write a book or a computer program. Then we can send that program or book to companies that specialize in reproducing them and distributing them.
If I ever write an autobiography about teaching meditation in the West, I'll call it "Pissing In the Wind - Teaching Buddhism in America".
He managed to do this 'tour de force' of styles without ever breaking the narrative structure of the chapter he was writing. It is the most brilliant parody of writing styles that I have ever read.
In one particular chapter in Ulysses, James Joyce imitates every major writing style that's been used by English and American writers over the last 700 years - starting with Beowulf and Chaucer and working his way up through the Renaissance, the Victorian era and on into the 20th century.
I have chosen to parody the writing styles of Carlos Castaneda, James Redfield, Richard Bach, Lynn Andrews, and several other best-selling new age authors.
While I am writing about the details of my own intimate encounters and journeys in America and the Far East.
In writing Snowboarding to Nirvana I have intentionally written an inspirational spiritual adventure story, which will hopefully provide people with metaphysical techniques, spiritual knowledge, hope and a brighter view of life.
It's suggested that enlightenment has some tremendous compassion, some driving necessity to help humanity. I don't think that's the case at all. I think humanity wishes it were the case since it's humanity that writes the various scriptures.
I have found myself writing poetry shortly after I retired. Which I hadn't done in forty years.
I always write the best that I can. And I won't publish it until I have done it right.
When I am writing a novel I try not to read great prose stylists into which I will fall.
What I try to do is read stuff that won't deal with the dangerous dark things I hope I am writing about.
In a way, I see my fiction as having moved in that direction - and the characters as dealing simultaneously with their personal history and with the present in which they are trying to make their way. So that the books are simultaneously about public and interior events. And I am having a great time getting confused and crazed writing about them.
The importance to the world of what we scribblers write is in doubt, I would think.
I always want to read Gore Vidal's nonfiction. Because everything he writes is an essay and it's worth reading.
I don't think I want to write a third book. But the more people talk to me about it, the more I think maybe I do.
When you are writing a character, what the character says is obviously crucial. But what the character doesn't say is absolutely as important as his words.
Preaching and writing - it's the same. Whether I'm writing to speak or writing to be read in a book, it's the same thing.
What makes me a believer is that from time to time, going back almost as far as my memory will go back, there have been glimpses I've had. Sometimes literally a glimpse which made me suspect the presence of something extraordinary and beyond the realm of the immediate. That's what I think a lot of what my writing has been, my preaching has been - trying to listen to that voice again, to see those moments again.
Meg Pokrass writes like a brain looking for a body. Wonderful, dark, unforgiving.
When you are out of favor, so to speak, it's not just the reviewers. It's the editors, the publishers, they don't want you anymore, you're just gone and you've been written out of history as effectively as the old Stalinists would write someone else out, take their photograph out of a book.
It is from the graves and ruins and rubbish-heaps of Egypt that writings have been restored to us in great numbers.
