For me, music was always a second language. I didn't have a musical background, and I started studying very late, at fourteen.

I'm not sure any narrative model has been more important for me than Benjamin Britten's chamber operas.

I think it's harder to avoid reflection on those larger patterns of history or society when they so insistently call into question your right to exist.

I'm not sure I can articulate any principles behind the decisions about what to cut and what to keep.

I guess I've done a lot of different kinds of performing at various times - opera singing, poetry reading, not least high school teaching - and I do enjoy it, at least sometimes. But I find it incredibly anxiety-producing and exhausting. Privacy is more congenial, and I go a little crazy if I can't spend a big chunk of every day, or almost every day, alone. Certainly I have to be alone to write.

I felt a lot of ambivalence about going back to graduate school for a second MFA. The impulse was really the opposite from what it had been more than a decade before: I wanted to interrupt a career.

Being a high school teacher was wonderful, but unsustainable: I needed a way out.