“The story itself, the true story, is the one that the audience members create in their minds, guided and shaped by my text, but then transformed, elucidated, expanded, edited, and clarified by their own experience, their own desires, their own hopes and fears.”

“The story, the true story, is the one that the audience members create in their minds... transformed, elucidated, expanded, edited, and clarified by their own experience, their own desires, their own hopes and fears... If the story means anything to you at all, then when you remember it afterward, think of it, not as something I created, but rather as something that we made together.”

“The truth is, in order to heal we need to tell our stories and have them witnessed...The story itself becomes a vessel that holds us up, that sustains, that allows us to order our jumbled experiences into meaning.As I told my stories of fear, awakening, struggle, and transformation and had them received, heard, and validated by other women, I found healing.I also needed to hear other women's stories in order to see and embrace my own. Sometimes another woman's story becomes a mirror that shows me a self I haven't seen before. When I listen to her tell it, her experience quickens and clarifies my own. Her questions rouse mine. Her conflicts illumine my conflicts. Her resolutions call forth my hope. Her strengths summon my strengths. All of this can happen even when our stories and our lives are very different.”

“My readers have to work with me to create the experience. They have to bring their imaginations to the story. No one sees a book in the same way, no one sees the characters the same way. As a reader you imagine them in your own mind. So, together, as author and reader, we have both created the story.”

“I edit my own stories to death. They eventually run and hide from me.”

“I know you like to be in control and you operate a lot from fear but you have to break the bounds of your past Nicole and rewrite the story you’ve been telling yourself based off of others experiences. You have to create your own experience, write your own story.”