For years following the death of my mother, I wanted to write about her. I started writing what I thought of as personal essays about growing up as her child, but I never could finish any of them. I think I was too close to that loss, and too eager to try and resolve things, to make her death make sense.

I want to just go to places where writers don't usually go, where people like me don't usually show up, and say, 'Here are some poems. Do they speak to you? What do you hear in them?'

When my father died, those years when he was working on the Hubble came back to me, and it seemed fitting to imagine him as having somehow merged with the large mystery that the universe represents.

The glib, facile, simplistic, and prefabricated language by which we as consumers are constantly surrounded is a language that flatters us, that urges us to indulge ourselves, to get away from it all, to be unique by opting in, talking back, liking us on Facebook, leaving a review, sharing, retweeting, etc.

If I were a writer and not a singer in 10 years, I don't know how I'd feel about writing really personal songs and getting someone else to sing them.

Obviously I love working in film and television, but I started in theater and I'd love to be on Broadway.

I'm trying to transmit the visions of creativity and build institutions that are incredibly catalytic to their fields.

I worry that I am not really a person anymore: I'm more of just a writing machine. I wonder what that has done to either my life and or my art.