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!"

I like it when poems are challenging, when they concern matters important and personal to the author.

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.

One cannot have "success" in poetry. If I wanted to be successful, I'd have become a lawyer.

Place is extremely important to my work because I am always pulling landscape imagery into my poems.

I love teaching poetry writing. Students come into the class thinking poetry has to be one way, then leave having created pieces that are wholly original, that have - quite literally - never been made before.

It takes a certain kind of mind to narrate, to work through character motivation, to be unforgiving to one's writer-self when it comes down to creating the minutiae of detail. Writing fiction requires stamina, a sense of how people's lives work, how people work toward and against one another and, above all, precision.