It's probably a form of childish curiosity that keeps me going as a fiction writer. I ... want to open everybody's bureau drawers and see what they keep in there. I'm nosy.

Why do men feel threatened by women?

When I was 16, I started publishing all kinds of things in school magazines.

But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another.

I could see how you could do extreme things for the person you loved. Adam One said that when you loved a person, that love might not always get returned the way you wanted, but it was a good thing anyway because love went out all around you like an energy wave, and a creature you didn't know would be helped by it.

These things you did were like prayers; you did them and you hoped they would save you. And for the most part they did. Or something did; you could tell by the fact that you were still alive.

I did not know that 'poetess' was an insult, and that I myself would some day be called one. I did not know that to be told I had transcended my gender would be considered a compliment. I didn't know — yet — that black was compulsory. All of that was in the future. When I was sixteen, it was simple. Poetry existed; therefore it could be written; and nobody had told me — yet — the many, many reasons why it could not be written by me.