In Sister Swing, the two sisters have boyfriends and they go to bed with them, but the descriptions are not graphic. They're minimal. The sex is not graphic in the way that DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover has all these graphic passages.

Quite a while ago, I made a conscious choice to place my teaching first, so it was very ego-invested. That decision wasn't a good thing in some ways.

When someone asks me now, "What do you do?" I will be able to say, "I am a writer."

Sometimes, in my published complaints about not being a writer, I have recalled the prospect - the yearning to be a writer - as it first formed for me.

The city and nature, the built stone and the found stone, concrete and slate, poetry addresses them all democratically.

I came to realize this weird projection: you are much more passionate about hating something outside of you when you know that something is also in you.

[Cancer] didn't make me more intense about not working more and just having fun more. It didn't do that either.