My first professional job was with Berkeley Repertory Theatre. I started out in an educational touring play and eventually starred on their stages. That was the theatre that nurtured me to expand as an artist.

Part of the responsibility of being a modern storyteller is understanding modern audiences and trusting what they can handle. It's not just settling into what we think they want.

I was nervous about doing 'Scottsboro Boys' because I'm not a trained dancer, and there is a lot of very athletic dancing involved.

Other people can write grown-up, political plays about the troubles in the world. My plays deal with magic and hope.

The garden is growth and change and that means loss as well as constant new treasures to make up for a few disasters.

I think happiness comes from self-acceptance. We all try different things, and we find some comfortable sense of who we are. We look at our parents and learn and grow and move on. We change.

It's helpful to just hear things through friends' ears, people who know you well. I guess when I started Dirty Projectors, when I was, like, 20, I always imagined it would be kind of like an amphibious vehicle: something that could go with me wherever I need to go. That kind of constant change has been in the DNA from the beginning.

It took several years of trial and error, soul-searching and hard work to shape the ROI program into the ROI Community. In the first few years, we got to see the power of these gatherings and the resulting connections that spanned the globe. It inspired us to think about how we could transform an annual gathering into a year-round community.