There IS a difference between poetry and prose! Poems should be sonically charged and new to the ear.

There IS a difference between poetry and prose! Poems should be sonically charged and new to the ear.

The fiction writer has a lot of balls to juggle. Setting, pacing, dialogue, and so on. And let's not forget: plot. That was always a hard one for me. And I always had this spastic tendency to wrap up a story before I'd seen it the whole way through, a sort of writer's pre-ejaculatory tendency: "The End!"

When asked what I'd be if I weren't a writer, I'm tempted to respond with one of father's favorite phrases, one I despised while growing up: "I hate 'what-ifs.'"

The cool thing about having a book is that it takes on its own life. Once it's in the world, you can't follow it. You'd have to have a pretty fantastic surveillance system to track its migration.

I prefer poems that occupy an imaginative sphere. When I lived in Cincinnati, I was occasionally referred to as an "Ohio Poet;" this made me uneasy, not only because I think of myself as a generally American poet but also because I like to think I write out of the country of my own mind.

Different drinks have different metaphorical weight. Wine's heady, gin is poisonous, vodka's cold, and beer is plain boring. In real life, I'm a big fan of boxed white wine, much to the dismay of my more refined friends.