As Expected: She, The Daughter Of The

Students Teach All Sorts Of Things But Most Importantly They Make Explicit The Courage That It Takes To Be A Learner, The Courage It Takes To Open Yourself To The Transformative Power Of Real Learning And That Courage I Am Exposed To Almost Every Day At Mit And That I'm Deeply Grateful For.

But It's Clear To Me That Us Slow-poke Writers Are A Dying Breed. It's Amazing How Thoroughly My Young Writing Students Have Internalized The New Machine Rhythm, The Rush Many Of My Young Writers Are In To Publish. The Majority Don't Want To Sit On A Book For Four, Five Years. The Majority Don't Want To Listen To The Silence Inside And Outside For Their Artistic Imprimatur. The Majority Want To Publish Fast, Publish Now.

Books Don't Live And Die By Awards. You Don't Listen To An Hector Lavoe Album Because It Won Some Awards.

I Always Think About Myself As A Writer; That Comes Out Of Being A Reader First, And I Don't Think I Kind Of Got To Really Playing With Language In Any Formal Way Probably Until I Was In My Mid-twenties.

Art Has A Way Of Confronting Us, Of Reminding Us, Of Engaging Us, In What It Means To Be Human, And What It Means To Be Human Is To Be Flawed, Is To Be Contradictory, Is To Be Often Weak, And Yet Despite All Of These What We Would Consider Drawbacks, That We're Also Quite Beautiful. Spin Is The Opposite.