Shall I tell you something I've been noticing? The mistrust this society has for women. All kinds of experts and officials are terrified because so many women are working. They really think that women have to be coerced into having babies and raising kids.

Long hair is considered bohemian, which may be why I grew it, but I keep it long because I love the way it feels, part cloak, part fan, part mane, part security blanket.

I don't think writers change the past any more than other people do, except in so far as we may mine our lives and change things for fictional use.

Depressions, local and larger strikes, boom times, wars, repressions, all impact a life as do epidemics such as AIDS and pollution that may take years off a person's life. We all, whether we like it or not and whether we acknowledge it or not, are impacted by the racial attitudes we carry within us, and experience in some form every time we turn on the television, the radio, go to a movie, read a magazine or a newspaper, or walk down the street.

Praise our choices, sister, for each doorway open to us was taken by squads of fighting women who paid years of trouble and struggle, who paid their wombs, their sleep, their lives that we might walk through these gates upright. Doorways are sacred to women for we are the doorways of life and we must choose what comes in and what goes out. Freedom is our real abundance.

With my poems, I finally won even my mother. The longest wooing of my life.

There is no justice we don't make daily like bread and love.