The mind's passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.

Women have been driven mad, “gaslighted”, for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience. The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each other’s sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.

In the States, there has been, compared to the Sixties and Seventies, a huge retrenchment - not just in poetry - into the personal. A withdrawal from thinking in terms of social and collective values, needs and solutions. The consciousness-raising groups of the women's movement, for instance, becoming "support-groups" or therapy groups.

I think my work comes out of both an intense desire for connection and what it means to feel isolated. There's always going to be a kind of tidal movement back and forth between the two.

If we had time and no money, living by our wits, what story would you tell?

Marriage is lonelier than solitude.

Motherhood, in the sense of an intense, reciprocal relationship with a particular child, or children, is one part of female process; it is not an identity for all time.