I wrote poetry off and on in high school, when I could manage to get out of gym classes and sports - using my allergies as an excuse - and climb the hill behind school till I found a nice place to settle down with a notebook and look at Spokane spread out below.
I sort of tried to get a basketball scholarship out of high school, but that didn't happen. Then I started working for UPS, and that paid for tuition for school. I moved to a bigger town, Louisville. I did it for a year. I had to work the graveyard shift. And then you get off at eight for classes, so that sucked. Then I dropped out.
I actually live right near a high school and I always walk by...I live in a high school. I actually live in the boiler room of a high school at night. When I see high school guys now I'm actually like, 'Thank f - king God I'm not in high school anymore because they look like they could kick the living s - t out of me.'
High school was the first time I ever saw spoken word poetry. The first place I ever performed a poem was at my school, so in some ways it was the nucleus of how it all started. For me I think high school was a period of trying to figure myself out, and poetry was one of the ways I did that, and was a very helpful avenue to try to do that.
They're coming out of high school exhausted. The pressure in high school is killing these kids. By the time they get to college, they have been fighting for three or four years to get the perfect SAT scores and get into A.P. classes.
My earliest thought, long before I was in high school, was just to go away, get out of my house, get out of my city. I went to Medford High School, but even in grade school and junior high, I fantasized about leaving.
When I got out of high school, I thought, I'll take a year or two off and play the clubs, get this out of my system, and then go to med school.
I wrote poetry in middle school and high school and even through college. It was bad. I just don't think I'm very good at writing poetry. I mean, the distillation, I think, is hard for me, but I love poetry.
My writing routine is: get son off to school and sit down at 8 A.M. I read what I wrote the day before, and then write longhand, into a notebook. I prefer paper and pen because it feels closer to my brain.
I didn't get cool until I got to high school and people found out I could sing.
I used to skip out of high school and go flying. It was just one of those things, I thought it was kind of a cool thing to do. I never thought about doing that as a profession, but I started checking things out and I found out there was a flight school down in Daytona Beach, called Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.
'One Tree Hill' will always be very, very special to me. It was my first television show. And my first gig in the business. It was surreal. I booked the role when I was 13. I had just started high school, and literally, I think, a week into high school, I found out I got the role. It was unimaginable! I learned so much from that show.
When I grew up we had gym at school, two or three dance classes after school, ice skating lessons, and all sorts of sports at our finger tips. We weren't glued to computers because they didn't exist, so being active was all we knew.
I didn't go out on one date in high school. I played guitar and sang and wrote my own music and poetry and stuff when I was a teenager.
At some point you cannot be the kid in the glass bubble in this world. You might've heard throughout your grade school and high school years that it was a safe, nice, warm, fair, feeling place... but it can get brutal when it gets competitive. Especially when you succeed. Watch the detractors come out of the walls at that point.
I dabbled in writing, wrote really bad poetry in high school. I also took a few writing classes when I was an undergrad at Stanford. I was so intimidated.
When I went to high school, an all-boys' school, a Catholic school, I tried out for football, and I didn't make it. It was the first time, athletically, that I was knocked down.