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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim"I want to be always happy," Maxine Hong Kingston announces . But, as this interview makes clear, for me, it was the desire to write poetry that kept me discontented, if not depressed and unhappy, through what many casual biographers have characterized as successful and productive decades.
Shirley Geok-lin LimI really felt neurotic - it was a neurotic reason - but I had to teach very, very well. That sucked up a lot of oxygen from my time and my creative thinking.
Shirley Geok-lin LimI had a couple of Asian readers and other folks tell me, "Oh, you have a lot of sex in your writing."
Shirley Geok-lin LimI 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.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim