When you're a writer, you're always looking for conflict. It's conflict that drives great stories.

I think that whether we acknowledge it or not, our opinions as authors always influence our work. How can they not?

Readers anticipate that a significant element of every story will be additional exposure to the ways of the Ojibwe. The truth is that I enjoy this aspect of the work. Although I have no Indian blood running through my veins, in college I prepared to be a cultural anthropologist, so exploring other cultures is exciting to me.

Hip-hop is substance. It's social. It's science - that's what it started off as. We have fun, and we still having fun; ain't nothing wrong with fun, but we need that social, we need that substance, we need that science, and we need that spiritual.

O Lord have mercy on me, to God I commend my soul.

When you meditate or pray... both are forms of meditation... you give up control and find the answer and you open yourself to receive God's gift, the universal force, or whatever that is.

The life-giving preacher is a man of God, whose heart is ever athirst for God, whose soul is ever following hard after God, whose eye is single to God, and in whom by the power of God's Spirit the flesh and the world have been crucified, and his ministry is like the generous flood of a life-giving river.