<Begin Segment 34>

MY: During, during the time in Irvine, I think, after I discovered that I wasn't dying any more and my health got better, I found a wonderful allergist who was able to help me with my, control my asthma, and so I felt a real surge of energy. And people often asked me, "How can you write and be active in Amnesty and teach full-time?"

Of course I, then I retired in 1989, but before that, I don't sleep very much, you know. The first, when I started writing was when I thought I was dying, and then my problems with, my breathing problem was asthma, I couldn't sleep very much. So I kind of get along with about five or six hours of sleep every night, and so if I go to bed at midnight, if I go to bed about eleven, after the eleven o'clock news and go to bed, I'm up about four or five o'clock. And so when I started, when I was teaching, I asked -- by that time I was pretty much of a veteran teacher, to start teaching later rather than eight o'clock classes. I asked for ten o'clock or eleven o'clock classes and I didn't mind teaching in the afternoon, because I found that I was just too mentally exhausted to write after I came home, after reading these creative writing, student writings, critiquing their compositions and so forth, it was just too much to come home and put my mind in -- so what it -- Jeni and I often say that we're kind of newspaper junkies, you know? You get up, get up in the morning and you get the paper, start reading to find out what's going on in the world, get the New York Times -- I used to read the New York Times and I'd read about five different papers. So I cut that all out, and so in the morning, your mind is fairly clear, you just really have to write while there isn't, you don't fill it up with all kinds of information before you do that. And so the night before you go to bed and sometimes I think of things that I'm writing during the night. And I used to tell my creative writing students that sometimes I write on the freeway while I'm driving, but, and I'm not very good in dictating to a tape recorder and so I often think, well, when I stop I'm going to write it down, compose a poem in your head and then you're going to write it down. And so I'd then drive into the parking lot, you park your car, you fumble around, and get your notebook out, and get your pen, and it's gone. And so I said, "Very often what I do is I just kind of pull by the, by the side of the freeway, and I just sit down and write it down when it comes to your head." And the students were going, wow, that's kind of weird, you know? [Laughs] "That's really heavy," one of the students said. [Laughs] And then they said, "Well, how about getting a..." "Fine, if you know how to get a tape recorder, but I'm telling you, when something comes into your mind about writing, you do have to write it down right away, and sometimes I have a pad and I'm trying to write it while I'm driving but that's kind of dangerous, so don't try that." [Laughs] And so forth, but they're the kind of things you have to figure out on your own that you're going to write.

<End Segment 34> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.