May my heart be kind, my mind fierce, and my spirit brave.
If we want a better world, we must never cease to think about what kind of world we want... and we must not be afraid to do whatever it takes to make the world the way it should be. It is not enough just to talk. We must act!
Since the moment I could hold a pencil, I have spent nearly all day every day writing. And there is not an age group that I have not written for. You can read me from birth 'til death.
As an adult, I have often been deep in serious conversation with someone I've highly respected and seen them roll an eye as my mouth has mangled yet another magnificently conceived, clumsily articulated sentence. In my mind, the words are mellifluous as honey. In my mouth, they are shards of glass.
Fairytales were never really meant for children; they were meant as cautionary tales for teenagers on the verge of growing up.
Storytelling is as old as speech. It existed before humans first began to carve shapes in stones and press their hands upon the rocky walls of caves.
When our ancestors crouched about the camp fire at night, they told each other tales of gods and heroes, monsters and marvels, to hold back the terrors of the night. Such tales comforted and entertained, diverted and educated those who listened, and helped shape their sense of the world and their place in it.
I wrote my novel 'Bitter Greens' as the creative component of a Doctorate of Creative Arts and am now looking at the history of the Rapunzel tale as my theoretical component.
The storyline of a fantasy novel is filled with such a sense of enchantment, beauty and strangeness; it allows the writer to explore the big ontological questions of life that would sound like a sermon in a social realist novel.
Fairy tales are stories of triumph and transformation and true love, all things I fervently believe in.
I love fairy tales because of their haunting beauty and magical strangeness. They are set in worlds where anything can happen. Frogs can be kings, a thicket of brambles can hide a castle where a royal court has lain asleep for a hundred years, a boy can outwit a giant, and a girl can break a curse with nothing but her courage and steadfastness.
You cannot write a book unless it is totally inhabiting your imagination and you are totally engrossed with it. Which is a kind word for obsession.
It has always seemed a cruel joke to me that the very word 'stutter' is difficult for many stutterers to pronounce. It is onomatopoeic, an imitation of the halting, repetitive sound made by people with this speech dysfunction.
I have struggled all my life with my stuttering. Not to mention all my other speech impediments. I think I have every language disorder known to speech pathologists.
