Breath and brevity are sisters; the long-winded is an enemy who muffles your heartbeat.

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

It is true that my characters have sex.

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.

I can't imagine otherwise - I guess Virginia Woolf could write wonderful novels where the women never have sex, and her novels work. But for me, I don't think I could write a plot without sex happening somewhere.

If the act of writing is the act of putting aside the masculine, then you might in that way, it may sound almost crazy to say this, say that the act of writing, for a woman, could be a homosexual act.

The inimitable writer Maxine Hong Kingston published a book in 2002 with the title To Be the Poet. However, in contrast to the transformatory distinctions Kingston makes between the conditions of being a prose writer and "the poet," my multigenre impulses incline me to a broader transformation: to be a writer.