I guess it was easier for me to find my voice in poetry than it was in fiction. I'm working on fiction again, and I find it a lot more difficult. It's a struggle. At a certain point, you have your voice and you go to it every time, so it's not like reinventing the wheel. That's the way I see it at least.

When I was a young woman, I had this friend who was really beautiful, and she would talk about how she was losing her looks, that she wasn't as pretty as she once was. She was gorgeous, and I thought, I'm going to stop this bad habit of self-criticism that I think a lot of women get into. You make a choice to be different.

One of things I write about a lot is the role of women. An older friend of mine said that she feels like there's always a tension between wanting to be free and wanting to be cherished. I think that's one of the things that my whole book speaks to, wanting to break out of the confines of the roles that are prescribed for women and yet at the same time, not wanting to be totally free. You want to have intimate relationships. It's that bursting out of confinement.

I guess it was easier for me to find my voice in poetry than it was in fiction. I'm working on fiction again, and I find it a lot more difficult. It's a struggle. At a certain point, you have your voice and you go to it every time, so it's not like reinventing the wheel. That's the way I see it at least.

I was born in New Orleans, but I grew up in Hawaii. That was a paradise. That's a paradise I keep inside of me all the time. It's funny, I don't really write too much in poetry about Hawaii, but I published a book of stories a couple of years ago.

I think it's really hard to be joyful. I work hard at it. I always feel like it's a choice. You can be joyful or you can be depressed, and there just doesn't seem to be any future in depression.

Everybody spoke English in my class, and they would turn to me and say, "What's going on in your country?" I would try to explain to Austrians, Poles, Australians, Israelis, Costa Ricans - people from all over the world - what was going on in our country. I would have to say, "I don't know what's going on, either. It's pretty evenly divided in our country. Sometimes one part's on top, and other times, the other faction is on top, and right now it's just crazy. We hate it as much as you do."