I was born in a mining village, and you either played football or played football. If you didn't play, there was something wrong with you.
I knew Bobby Dylan back in the days when he lived in the village. He used to come and see me and sing songs for me, saying they ought to go into my next collected book on American folk music.
When my friends talk about childhood, I've never heard of any cartoons or TV they remember. The only thing we share is Michael Jackson. That's how far his music travelled - to a remote village on the other side of the world.
I know Juffure was a British trading post and my portrait of the village bears no resemblance to the way it was. But the portrait I gave was true of nearly all the other villages in Gambia. I, we, need a place called Eden. My people need Pilgrim's Rock.
In 1990, my wife and I were married in her village in southwestern Uganda. The festivities went on for three days, and all the while a couple of dozen gray-crowned cranes, with regal bonnets of sun-shot yellow feathers, were pecking and padding around in the adjacent savanna.
I grew up in a miniature village in the middle of the countryside in England, quite secluded from the outside world. I was always enamored by the fashion industry.
I've known the poet Eileen Myles since the 1990s, when I first moved to New York, and I remember seeing her walking her Pit Bull Rosie around the East Village. She had these beautiful arms and David Cassidy hair and the sort of swagger so many of the gay boys I knew wished we had. We all had crushes on her.
My father is from the village of Beranci, Macedonia, and my mother is from Greece.
I never even went to Jekyll & Hyde's restaurant. I loved the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, though.
I was keen to earn my own money from an early age. I had a job as a paper girl in my local village when I was about 11 - and when I was a bit older, around 15, I was a waitress.
