when I learned to read and write, I devoured books, and I thought that they were like trees, like animals, something that is born. I didn’t know there was an author behind it all. Eventually, I discovered that that’s how it was, and I said, “I want that, too.”

From early on, I was nourished in a literary way. I didn't realize that there was a writer already living in me

when I went to first grade, when we started to learn how to read, I was so thrilled about what happened with symbols and that suddenly it opened up a world to me. I read all of the books in the first grade classroom and was sent into the second grade, and it became like a hunger for me. I liked the sounds, of course, I like the sound that words make. I like the percussion, the percussive elements and the images and so on. Just like the same kind of thing I heard in my mother's song-making. But the more I read and the more the ability grew, the deeper I could read, the more stories and I could be transported in — much the same way that I could be in that kind of visionary dream world when I was younger. And when we get to about 7 — and I think this happens to a lot of us — we forsake those realms of knowing and understanding, and reading helped give that back.

I learned very young that language and story are carriers of a much deeper reality, and that we have to fight for them the same way we fight to preserve culture and art.

I like to immerse myself in the material over and over again, so it becomes ingrained in me. I live, eat, breathe and feel the story until I can figure out how best I can tell it

I did a lot of reading on my own because I loved that particular world. You open up a book and you learn about something that's much more exciting than your everyday grind, a world of magic beyond your own. And I feel that the beginnings of writing really start whereby you know that when you open a book there's a magical world there.

for I had reached a point in my life when I came to view words differently. A closer look at language could reveal the secret of life.

As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs...The way I write is who I am, or have become...

when you know each word written on that page, when you get so deep into the writing, the story, and the meaning, the familiarity of it allows you to fall into it. It just comes.

Being a writer requires an intoxication with language.

My mother started her Eng Lit studies when I was nine, which continued until she got her doctorate when I was in high school, so our house was filled with literature. Literally. Piles of books and the sound of method actors intoning on vinyl. I grew up saturated in words – I remember everything from Shakespeare, Hopkins and Chaucer to Bosman, Conrad and Plath. Unisa was very tolerant. I’d sit quietly at the back of lectures and seminars and drink it all in. It was a rich childhood.

Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words.

Contact with books pushed me toward writing. In books I found a special space of the imagination, and I wanted to create my own...When I write, I feel so rich. Rich with love affairs and friendships that I have had, rich with my experience as a mother of two children, rich with my life as one half of a couple, rich with my ups and downs, with everything that I have seen and read...Reading and writing function for me as two sides of the same adventure: the meeting of language, ideas, and images.

For me—and I think for most writers—you're a reader first and then it just happens. You so love it that you want to be part of it, and you start writing.