Erasures are interesting to me because they prove what particular sieves we all are.

When I have my students do erasures, I'm always amazed by the way their voice comes through, whether they're doing an erasure of a romance novel or an encyclopedia. Your sensibility will out.

A lot of people are writing poems and don't realize it. They have this limited idea of how the poem should sound or what subjects it should address.

Teaching is a great way to keep learning.

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

I thought that perhaps if the sky was truly free of clouds and any other distractions (birds, kites, skywriting), we could see if there was something else out there. I wasn't really raised in any religion (in England I attended an Anglican school and went to a Methodist church, but I left that all behind at the age of eight when we moved to the U.S.), but like most people, I sometimes wonder if there's anything or anyone out there.

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 . . .