I feel too much. It's like being drummed to death from within. You know?

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

I've left the Church - for many reasons that I've written about publicly - but it's still a large part of my identity, and I still have my faith, if not my Church.

As a writer, my main objective is to tell the story urgently - as if whispering it into one ear - and to know the characters intimately.

Writing across genres has made me more prolific. When one is fighting me or simply not cutting it, I turn to another.

I was born in the era of the novel. I've written many, as well as collections of poetry, and essays for mouthing off. I've written to inches, word-counts, page-counts, even the sonnet and the screenplay (which I call a plot poem). I write narrative. That's it. I just want to tell it.

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.