I do have a tendency to invest inanimate objects with human qualities.

Poems can't help but be personal. Mine are certainly an accurate blueprint of the things I think about, if not a record of my daily life.

It's really thrilling to work with an illustrator - your vision expands with the addition of someone else's artwork/artistic vision.

I would love to collaborate on a graphic novel with an artist - I'm terrible at drawing but I really love that genre.

I don't see much difference between prose poems and flash fiction (I've often taught the latter as the former), but then I also don't see that much difference between art and poetry.

In my own writing, I've mostly abandoned end-rhyme, but wordplay is still a huge part of my process. I've written a series of mermaid poems in the last few years. The first one was called "The Straightforward Mermaid" which arose from my delight in that word combination. After that, I decided that future mermaid poems would have to be words ending in "d" or "t," which led to "The Deadbeat Mermaid," "The Morbid Mermaid" and so forth . . .

Not everyone is going to like every carnival ride.