Tear gas canisters scattered in the fields by Israeli soldiers say, "Made in Pennsylvania."...I keep thinking of those signs in the United States at … - Naomi Shihab Nye

A fundamentalist mind doesn't entertain anything. It latches on, clutches on, to something, and says Only this! That pretty well eliminates metaphor...And fanatics don't ask the questions, and to me that's always been the most critical creative act. It's to ask questions, period. And fundamentalist minds don't. I guess they think they have the answers and so they don't have to ask any more questions. And so I don't trust them. (Maybe the fundamentalist doesn't have the strength for questions.) Maybe not. Or the stretch. The idea that you could stretch and come back to your own shape. That's threatening. And that's one thing that poetry can really give us - the sense of the stretch. That we can always stretch-poems help us feel that about our experiences. Fluent and fluid.

Part of the role of the writer is to encourage other people to discover their voices.

Teaching and writing are separate, but serve/feed one another in so many ways. Writing travels the road inward, teaching, the road out – helping OTHERS move inward