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.

I am the flesh boat of my experiences, we all are , my feelings, thoughts, desires and dreams are captured in my body's pliant cells, fastened onto my DNA.

That's how it is sometimes--God comes to your window, all bright light and black wings, and you're just too tired to open it.

I share my life experiences as a poet with my students. My poetic difficulties, joys, struggles and discoveries. If I read a new poem or essay or book I'm excited about, I bring it in.

How not to imagine the tumors ripening beneath his skin, flesh I have kissed, stroked with my fingertips, pressed my belly and breasts against, some nights so hard I thought I could enter him, open his back at the spine like a door or a curtain and slip in like a small fish between his ribs, nudge the coral of his brains with my lips, brushing over the blue coil of his bowels with the fluted silk of my tail.

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.

We with my husband [Joseph Millar] are often the first reader for one another's work, and we often also have the last word. We trust each other. We have our past working life in common, our recombined families, as well as our life as teachers, and we read much of the same literature and have similar esthetics, so there's a simpatico there. But we do disagree and that can be fruitful, even if it's not so great in the moment.