Mayer Hawthorne

I really love rap music. I grew up in the '80s and '90s with Public Enemy, N.W.A., LL Cool J - I'm a hip-hop encyclopedia. But I got kind of frustrated with the chauvinistic side of rap music, the one that makes it hard to write songs about love and relationships.

I record my radio show, and my staff makes me a nice lunch in the kitchen, usually fish - whatever's freshest and line-caught - and a salad. I drink water and herbal tea, a blend of catnip, elderberry, and horehound.

I didn't learn much about writing at Sarah Lawrence, but I learned a lot about the sources of poems - dreams, myth, history - from the really great teachers, Joseph Campbell, Charles Trinkhaus, Bert Loewenberg, and a young Australian anthropologist named Harry Hawthorne.