We all get habituated, right? You get up in the morning, have your coffee, and read your newspaper, and that’s great. Everybody loves life in its mundane, daily aspects. It’s what makes us feel secure. But I also start to go numb a little bit and I don’t see what’s around me. So I put myself in a new situation and suddenly I’m really seeing the person next to me, hearing music, and I’m smelling, and I can’t help but want to write it down.

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.

When you have worked with people all day who have so little and struggle to make it stretch, who live outside the rarefied, you are humbled.

If trees could speak they wouldn't

I try to avoid calling myself a poet because I think that's something someone else has to call you. It's like bragging.

I would say my life experiences are my poetry, whether I'm writing about those actual, factual experiences or not.

I also have my backpack of the tried-and-true, and because it is new to [my students], it becomes fresh to me again as well.