The reason I started writing was because I was a little kid in San Diego who was getting beaten up by her dad and sexually abused and because I felt different than everybody else and I had this big huge secret that was tearing me apart.

If trees could speak they wouldn't

Maybe it's what we don't say/that saves us.

Joseph [Millar] is much more disciplined than I am. He's up every morning meditating, then he writes, and he reads throughout the day. He probably reads ten books to my two and writes twice as much as I do.

I love people and psychology. As a writer, I’m not so interested in Fred getting from the living room to the car. I want to go inside Fred’s soul and play there.

The changes that have occurred in poetry have been minor when you look at it over the scale of human time. It's like a rose, maybe a hybrid with color and size differentials, but the same genus, plucked from the same original blowsy family.

You are not your poetry. Your self-esteem shouldn't depend on whether you publish, or whether some editor or writer you admire thinks you're any good.