I have brothers and was a tomboy, if that's still a designation. It wasn't a stretch for me to think and write as a 13-year-old boy - it is freeing.

I work really out of mythology, so often I work out of a story that has remained lodged inside somehow, or I work out of history, you know, out of a sense of historical inevitability with characters.

I prefer to have some beliefs that don't make logical sense.

But then as time passed, I learned the lesson that parents do early on. You fail sometimes. No matter how much you love your children, there are times you slip. There are moments you can't give, stutter, lose your temper, or simply lose face with the world, and you can't explain this to a child.

Of course, English is a very powerful language, a colonizer's language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures - its cruelty is its vitality.

I think one of the most fertile, unexplored areas for poets and fiction writers is the world of science. I become overwhelmed by the science world.

If, as I suspect, my body survives by uttering itself over and over again, then I have some questions. If [I] am one word, so are my daughters, so are all of us in strings and loops. Each life is one short word slowly uttered.