For 'King Cole's American Salvage,' I rode around in the wrecker with a local driver and watched him deal with customers and hook up the cars. I watched the guy who tore apart the cars in the junkyard. I also wrote poems about those guys. I loved hanging around the yard.

Drugs and drinking affect every family I know, country and city, middle-class and poor.

I can't personally drink or fight too much nowadays because I have to be perky in the morning in order to write.

It occurred to Susan that men were always waiting for something cataclysmic-love or war or a giant asteroid. Every man wanted to be a hot-headed Bruce Willis character, fighting against the evil foreign enemy while despising the domestic bureaucracy. Men just wanted to focus on one big thing, leaving the thousands of smaller messes for the women around them to clean up.

You can't beat a good sonnet, and you can write a sonnet without being married to the damned thing.

The best and easiest lesson for me was to learn that writing is mostly hard work.

I was never a big reader as a kid. My imagination wasn't captured by books very often. It was captured more often by boys and partying and riding horses.