I didn't write poems for a number of years after graduate school because the criticisms of other students in the workshops wouldn't quiet down in my mind when I tried to work.

That being said, if you slept with me and are filled with shame at the possibility of the world knowing, then you should have considered that before you hopped into bed with a writer.

Curiously, the balance seems to come when writing is woven into every aspect of my life, like eating or exercising - one flows constantly into the next: I'll wake up and have coffee, read the news, then write a letter or two (always in longhand), then go teach, and after teaching write a bit in a journal - dreams, what I had for breakfast and lunch and why I had it, what's on the iPod, sexual habits, etc. - then read a bit, then work on a real bit of writing...you get the idea.

I read a lot; I tried to understand the mechanisms that made the books I liked successful, and I went that route. So, as for readers - when I think about them I like to think they read the same books I do.

I've always been a fan of comedy, and I understood from a young age that what makes most comedy work is the immediacy of first person experience. I'd spent a lot of time from 1995-1998 focusing almost exclusively on poetry, and it's an incredibly difficult form in which to achieve a sustained comic tone unless you're Alexander Pope.

Energy seems to be the more critical of those two variables, because if I'm really feeling the push/pull to write, then I'll make the time.

You know, there are those writers who work at writing every day. I'm not one of those guys. I tend to work at varying levels of intensity, based on the amount of time and energy I have available.