The poem might come to you as you're preparing to teach a lecture, right? And when you say, "no" to that occasion, that poem is gone.

As the only girl growing up for a long time with only boys, as you pointed out, it seems like I was always surrounded by guys. There was this sense in which my female body was a problem.

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

As a female in a home with a whole bunch of brothers and being very close to my father, without a mother and later having a hostile relationship with my stepmother, there were all kinds of Freudian issues rising from possessing a female body that I had to negotiate with no guidance, and I did this negotiation almost instinctually.

I was walking every morning, and I'd take my iPod and paper and pen. As I walked, I wrote a poem, and then I'd come home - and sometimes it's legible, sometimes not - I typed the poem up. So I have a new, yet to be published, collection of poems now. It's called Walker's Alphabet, and among other things, it is about walking. My most recent collection of poems in 2010, incidentally, was titled WALKING backwards.

Poetry has roots, but they are sometimes cut off and still poetry is written.

The things that I dislike passionately, I have come to realize, are also part of me.