I'm always resisting [my muse]. I'm resisting her power.

Poetry has roots, and sometimes they are aerial. Sometimes they are buried.

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

I always wanted to be pretty as a girl, although I believed it was not possible.

The crows that are predatory are something you have to deal with. For me, they also become associated with cancer cells.

No matter how sheltered [my students] are, no matter how their parents try to do right by them, every single one of them, you know, every single one of us, that's what we all face. And so it's made me - that's the one change I've marked in myself - it's made me change in the way I relate to my students. I've become a different teacher in that way.

When I spoke at the 2012 Contemporary Women Writers' Conference in Taipei, I thought it offered an appropriate moment and site to announce my new manifesto10 and profession - to be a writer.