I didn't know folk music growing up, no. It's something I've come to study, really, because I think there's so much to learn from traditional music in the sense of the way music began as a way of communication, the traveling storyteller, the bard, the minstrels.

I come from an art-school background, and I still feel that in my music, it's about exploration and challenging myself, about putting myself in a place that's frightening because I haven't been there before.

I've always felt that I'm affected by the world, by the way we treat each other, by the way different countries treat each other.

In order to make my solo shows as interesting as possible, I moved songs onto very different instruments so that I was moving instruments quite a lot during the set.

Walking by water frees your creativity. I don't know how it works - there's something about it that's liberating.

Respect the language in which you write. Be kind, develop good vocabulary, and be creative in writing beautiful sentences. Your prose should be your poetry when you write.

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

I love teaching creative writing, and I think I'm good at it, but in a different life, I could have been teaching elementary school.