Originality has nothing to do with producing something ’ new’ - it is about seeking the source, the primordial ground from which you draw and have always drawn your being. It comes about when one works from one’s origins, it is the dance of the eternal return… and is as ancient as the Dreamtime.

My dear woman, our greatest problem is that almost everything is a goddamned code. We do not know what is real any more. Every gesture is symbolic. A man cannot shit short of some pundit finding hidden meaning in it. Even having children is a metaphor. Hence, we cannot trust ourselves; and, therefore, we do not trust anybody. No my dear, I do not believe in codes, and even if I did I certainly would not use one in my sleep! (from the play, Sixteen Words For Water)

THE THINGS POETS & WRITERS DO THAT I LOVEListen to the AncestorsAcknowledge their influences Trust their gut-feelings and act on themMaintain openness. Play Dance with languagesBe bold Refuse servilityAvoid arroganceEmbrace the unknownLove the journey Respect one’s fellow journeyers

Poetry is the struggle against the simplification, codification, and mummification of language, it serves as a constant redirect - moving us to the experience to which the words point.

No one ever developed their character by arranging their experiences in such a way that only ‘good’ things are allowed to happen to them. Character is not purchased with a dance in the street. It is not cheap, and it’s hard to come by, owing partly to the fact that it is the heir of disappointment, frustration, betrayal and deceit. However, it is not the inheritance that matters so much as what you do with it. In the face of seemingly insurmountable problems what do you do, and why do you do it? The same holds for dramatic characters whose strength, courage, insight and wisdom have to be earned.

We speak for those who cannot speak. We have a duty to tell the stories for those who do not have the advantages that we have to tell stories. We must not speak falsely. The stories that we are entrusted to tell are stories of our tribes, or the tribes into which we have been initiated.

Nothing that happens is meant to happen or not meant to happen. The ‘meant’ is the story we tell ourselves that allows us to make sense of what is fundamentally senseless. Does this make our lives less important? Only if that’s the story you want to tell yourself. Where do the stories end? They don’t. It’s stories all the way down. And all the way up.

The story writes you as much as you write it. And the process of re-writing isn't so much a quest to re-write the story as it is to re-write the writer.

Some writers might tell you that writing is like a piece of magic - a process of creating something out of nothing, and I guess I used to think about it that way too a long long time ago. But as I've lived my life and loved and lost friends and family, and seen dreams smashed and resurrected, and marveled at the pettiness, drear ambition and ignorance of the herd of which I am a part, I can no longer say that a poem or a story or a script comes from nothing. If it's any good, if it has any power, any potent emotional body, then it's something that a writer has paid for, not only in time, but in all the anxiety that accompanies living and those small fret-filled acts of becoming present that make it possible for us to see beyond our little patch of immediacy. It's not just a reaching out, but a reaching in, into the depths of our being from whence we've sprung.

Your audience is your adversary. If you don't have one get one - imagine it. Imagine it now. To whom is your story addressed and why? Audience is always a creative act of the imagination. You can't tell your story effectively and leave it out. It must be alive in you, vividly alive. It is in conflict with everything that is false in what you have written. If it is an audience worthy of your talent and potential, it won't let you slide by the lies, the laziness, the shortcuts. If you don't take audience seriously, you can be sure it will return the favor.

Fear is elemental to every human endeavour involving risk and change, which includes ALL creative endeavours. To be creative is to be anxious. To endure the anxiousness - to face it and work with it, to allow it to lay bare what has been hidden - is the beginning of faith, which, in a certain sense, is the courage to become, to become present, along with all the other characters, tribes and audiences whose actions move the unfolding drama that is the world.

The burning off and the gathering together are one.

As a writer, you can’t get to where you want to be, coming from the place you started, unless you have something extremely important you want to say to someone who really doesn’t want to know.

POUND We spend twelve hundred generations developing so-called civilization to the point where it produces an expert who can offer us salvation from our superstitions, and all we end up with is another superstition! If it takes someone like Freud to save us from our neuroses, what’s it gonna take to save us from Freud?