Suspense is one of the ways you persuade a reader to become engaged and stay engaged with your work.

Where I came from, the nights I had wandered and survived scared them, and where I would go they never imagined.

When I work I am pure as an angel tiger and clear is my eye and hot my brain and silent all the whining grunting piglets of the appetites.

I am my mother's daughter,... I am her only novel.

Remember that every son had a mother whose beloved son he was, and every woman had a mother whose beloved son she wasn't.

Every poet has a certain amount of "stuff." That's what you draw from for imagery. The more stuff you know well, not simply intellectually but sensually, emotionally, intimately, the wider the pool from which you draw.

A strong woman is a woman who craves love like oxygen or she turns blue choking. A strong woman is a woman who loves strongly and weeps strongly and is strongly terrified and has strong needs. A strong woman is strong in words, in action, in connection, in feeling; she is not strong as a stone but as a wolf suckling her young. Strength is not in her, but she enacts it as the wind fills a sail.