I concentrate on the lives of individuals whom the reader comes to know and feel with intimately.

Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn't work, throw it away. It's a nice feeling, and you don't want to be cluttered with the corpses of poems and stories which have everything in them except the life they need.

I would like people to come into my Dreamworld and then choose to stay.

A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into.

For you where never my blood sister so no more shall I call you little sister

The poets whom I knew then were all men and all seemed dauntingly sure of themselves - although I am sure that really they were as uncertain as I was.

My first collection of poems was published by Bloodaxe Books, which was then a very new imprint.