It's not that I bounce ideas off of my children as much as it is that having children has had a profound effect on the way I see the world. They have mined my soul. They've made me a better person and therefore a more empathetic writer.

Sometimes when reading aloud to my husband, I'll start crying. It completely stuns me. As if the words in my body and on the page - in relation to each other - are cocooned against my own feelings about what I'm writing until they're loosed in the air and become their own. Then I realize what I may or may not have done.

Love is selfless, it is a weakness, a giving in, a constant falling.

The generation of women who came before us did much of our shouting. They laid the groundwork and now we can be calm and constant and steady.

While I was in college becoming a good Catholic I was also becoming a writer - one haunted by Catholicism.

The poem has to bear the weight with image, language... the screenplay with dialogue, plot.

Women are constantly underestimated in our power, our reach, our collective pull.