Teachers have had a great effect on me as a child. I've always loved school and had a great appetite for learning. I cried when it was time to go back home and tried to jump from my mother's moving car to run back there.

It's extremely important that, as writers, we give a voice to those who don't have voices, including the other animals that we share the planet with and the places that are endangered or being lost.

I had real concerns about the relationship between nature and culture and places I wanted to write about... I thought, well, maybe I should try prose. It was a real struggle to begin because, first of all, there were so many words on the page - it was terrifying... Beginning was awful.

We're facing enormous changes in our planetary life, with climate change and the adaptations that all natural systems are going to have to make to these climate changes, and so it's extremely important to bear witness to what's happening.

I do think that the long poem speaks for an inner need for continuity. We live in a time of so many losses, disruptions, and distractions, that the need for a sense of the ongoing is quite real. The long poem is very satisfying in offering the psyche a model of coherence.

I think you have to live inside your contradictions and find a way to accept that that's the human condition - to be forced to live in contradiction.

As poets, we don't accept oppression; we are about a freedom of spirit, or whatever you want to call it. I think environmental concerns have to go to the deep place, so we speak from a place of great empathy for the planet - for the disadvantaged people, animals, places, cultures.