In many cultures, women are sometimes literally kept from learning to read or from going to school.

I love to read nonfiction and memoir, but I'm mostly interested in the piece of writing more than the person.

Teaching is very important to me, and it has become more important as I get older.

Anyone with an imagination can write about the day-to-day experiences of someone he or she is not.

Every once in a while someone says, 'You can't really learn anything, if you're really a writer then you wouldn't need to do it.' But I think what people need is the sense of not being alone. They go to MFA programs to be part of a community of people who care, and then you start caring about your friend who is trying to edit a magazine and your other friend who is stuck in the middle of her poem. There you have all kinds of things to worry about besides your own success.

Sometimes indirect style and varying chronology is great, but quite often I've seen it be just something that gets in the way. It turns out when I talk to the writer that she or he, and more often it's a woman, that she's worried.

We still have so many cultures in which people are imprisoned and whipped and killed for writing what they think.