I was driven, as have been many writers, both by a repulsion of the childhood home's narrow confines and a desire to reach further, to keep desiring more of a future not yet imagined and not yet written down.

I think that's what, to me, also talks about the silences in my work - as a woman, a woman writer, when you say, "no" or you have to say, "no" so often to the writing occasion, those occasions don't really come back.

People called me a tomboy. That was the term used then. I was very much someone who was comfortable in male clothing, and even later when I grew up, I was constantly wearing dungarees, wearing guy shirts.

What happens when a female writer invokes a female muse? Does something else happen? With Sappho's figures of desire, we have a different lesbian energy.

It's why muse is so impatient with me. I don't ever go to her until after the teaching or whatever is over.

My muse is very often, in my mind, a nagger. She nags me.

This condition [irony] has nothing to do with writer's block, a psychological syndrome, which is one of the few I have not diagnosed for myself!