Only when you have completed a novel, or a story, can you return to the beginning and revise or rewrite.

How does the poet transform his banal thoughts (are not most thoughts banal?) into such stunning forms, into beauty?

Before I undertake a lengthy project, I have usually given much thought to it over a period of years. My files are filled with likely subjects - which perhaps, one day, I will develop.

When I was very little, four or five, I did comic strip drawings, so my first novel had no words. I couldn't write and thought adult handwriting was a mysterious scribble. When I was 14, my grandmother gave me a typewriter and I started writing in a different way.

Art is fueled by rebellion: the need, in some amounting to obsessions, to resist what is, to defy one's elders, even to the point of ostracism; to define oneself, and by extension one's generation, as new, novel, ungovernable.

My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes.

Detroit, my 'great' subject, made me the person I am, consequently the writer I am - for better or worse.