When I write, I put aside the heterosexual world to admit a muse that is a woman-loving-woman female.

Even my novels offer passages in which the major character is imagined as a writer. In Joss and Gold, Li An is a business writer who edits her company's weekly public relations magazine. And in Sister Swing, Suyin writes human interest stories for a free, local community paper, The Asian Time.

No one, evidently, except me has found "No Alarms" poem ironical that an obsessive theme in my writing was - and has continued to be - not being able to write.

One arrives at a recognition that one needs to be distracted.

The problem of the female body is not something that I've studied, but my memoir does treat that theme.

With so many brothers, I could always find a pair of shorts to borrow and run around in.

Some Asian American male scholars have claimed this muse to be Guong Goong, God of Literature, and, simultaneously, although not coincidentally or triflingly, God of War, but I did not have such a gendered muse in mind then.