I do, but I never force it out of myself. I’m kind of trying to explore writing as a practice, so you know, I journal every day, I try and do kind of something for the art every day whether that’s reading or watching film or practicing guitar… It kind of ebbs and flows, but I do try and do something creative every day. When it comes to writing poetry or songs, I really have to have an idea or have that desire to get something down. I feel like the best art comes from a sense of necessity and urgency, like I can’t help but talk about this. I can only be in that creative space when I really want to and when internally it feels right.

Well, you’re right, I think the hard work definitely paid off. My grandmother drove me three hours to dance and three hours back from age six to age 11. I would do my school work in the car on the way there and then get home at like 11 o’clock at night, five days a week for many years. My training was seriously intense, and nothing came easy. I worked for everything I’ve ever been given.

No, never. Strangely enough, being such a tomboy, and being so—as my mother says—spoiled as a child, once I started dancing and in a way growing up, I was not the spoiled brat or the rebellious child that I was when I really had no reason to be as a child. When you work, it’s a laboratory. The dance studio, when we were working together, was the place where you experiment. I’m not intimidated by failure or making a mistake, because you learn from those situations. You don’t learn from a situation where you do something well. You enjoy it and you give yourself credit, but you don’t really learn from that. You learn from trial and error, trial and error, all the time. When you fail, maybe you failed in that particular instance, but you have discovered something else. A lot of the ballets that we went on to do were built around mistakes that we had made in the classroom. So you never throw anything out. Rebelling takes up energy. As a dancer, you don’t have that kind of energy to throw away.

Do I have a muse? Well, I don’t know if this is an adequate answer, but I suppose my muse is the people of South Africa. I’ve often said that the little — or maybe the lot — I know about loving and hating was taught me by South Africa. Now that’s a big debt. When you owe that much to a situation that has shaped your conscience, your heart, your whole life, you’re profoundly indebted.

But it was quite intense to be the first Black person that my German friends had seen. Actually laid eyes, and hands, on. And there was the German language, which I had to learn, and the German kids learned British English, so my American English was frowned upon. … Maybe I write like I do because I spent those years in the cauldron of not fluently speaking the native language of my classmates. Those several years of being told that the tongue I spoke wasn’t right.

Right. And let’s put Michelangelo in quotes, ’cause was he really the one who actually said that? But, anyway, the idea still holds. I feel that whatever I’m writing exists already. Maybe that’s because of a glitch in the space-time continuum and when I write I’m actually putting my living self behind the present moment in time. Like I’m following something through the woods. Eyes open. Ears open. Heart open. And I’m following a path that is sometimes behind me.