We work with young people, from the ages of 11 to 17. Our main program is the Pathways to Freedom. And we’ll be going from Memphis, Tennessee through ten other states, and Washington, DC, and to Canada. It began July 13th and ends August 8th. We hope to take as many young people and their chaperons as possible throughout these areas, and stop and have workshops and programs. They’ll be traveling in buses, and we hope that will inspire and give them a sense of history and also to encourage them to be concerned about their self and history and motivated to reach their highest potential.

I love making jam. Plum is best.

The Cumming fragrance line. the soap, Cumming in a bar (still available at alancumming.com) is my favorite ever pun on my name.

I think what we’re trying to do at the Panetta Institute is to try to get all young people to understand that they have a duty to give back to our country in some capacity.

Happiness springs from having found a form of expression that also earns recognition.

And now, advice for beginning mystics. Be sober, be intelligent, be educated, rely on the tangible reality as long as you can. Remember that the act of writing is a tiny part of a bigger something. Defend the value of the spiritual experience and if somebody tells you it’s an old fashioned notion, laugh loudly and serenely. Don’t trust priests of the postmodern religion of absolute playfulness.

The good part of aging is that you read more and more. You discover poets you never heard of when you were younger.

Generally, my hours are during the first part of the day; hardly ever in the evening. The hours nearer noon, the zenith of the day, are good for working.

Well, in a certain sense, the decision that I was the one who was going to be writing was already formed when I was 12 years old when I was spending those winter evenings reading Verne and other authors; I thought then that books were the best thing in the world. That this was something I wanted to do.

I love cities with a centre, like the Market Square in Kraków. They don’t have that in the States. A few cities were built upon Magdeburg rules, but not many. I really like New York, which has no centre (although you could count Central Park). In that respect, I’m like Venclova – I always seek the mediaeval that’s missing in America.