The world has gotten smaller and more accessible since I first started writing in the 70's.
I wish, naturally to prevent the possibility that someone may write an accidental, superficial, incomplete and perhaps untrue picture of me.
What I said to my family is, 'Our history is our own. Let people write what they want, we know who we are.'
A lot of people from my generation can't write songs anymore, or it's really hard and it's an unpleasant experience. I don't feel that way at all.
My first novel is loaded with food references largely because my cupboards were bare, and I was writing hungry.
That sense of failure, I don't know where people put it who don't write songs and aren't able to emote physically. It must go somewhere.
After seven years of writing - and working many jobs to support my family - I finally got published.
People had this image of the Jacksons as the perfect American family and I destroyed that image. But what people have to understand is writing that book was very healing for me.
I'd always loved to read - and come from a family of readers - but I never thought about writing as a career.
I love getting out the house because writing is such a solitary business that even being at the library makes me feel part of the world.
It was actually a women's writing group I belonged to in graduate school that gave me the courage to move from poetry to fiction.
If you enjoy math and you write novels, it's very rare that you'll get a chance to put your math into a novel. I leapt at the chance.
One of my favorite things I read was John Steinbeck's journals while he was writing 'East of Eden,' which was so cool.
I try to combine in my paintings cinematic feeling, emotional feeling, and sometimes actually writing on the page to combine all the different elements of communication.
I once saw Dizzy Gillespie at a live show, and it made me want to go home immediately and start writing.
Then in my early teens, when the home computer bubble was blowing, I had one of the first, an Acorn Atom, and used to write primitive adventures on that.
I hope to be remembered for writing books about social justice that also have enough aesthetic value to endure as works of literature.
I should add that it is open to debate whether what we call the writing of history these days is truly scientific.
My dad is a writer, and to see him always in front of a typewriter gave me the inspiration to write. He was my idol, my hero. I wanted to be just like him.
The advice I have for new artists is this - write great songs and play them live as often as possible. Get residencies all over town and crush it.
My early life has given me a great deal to draw on, certainly - but would I have swapped a happy childhood for the writing? Yes.
