The body in defense against male appropriation expresses itself through work in writing, and the work in writing produces the book. So it's a different form of creation and generation that may be viewed as creation without male contribution as a component or challenge.

Note, the reply will not be "I write," an act that I have, after all, been performing since I was nine.

I have a muse who's very powerful, but I'm still a hopeless deadbeat of a poet.

Heterosexuality - whichever gender you are - says that the other gender is very important to you.

In some ways it is absurd for me to assert, counter to evidence, that I have not been writing.

"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.

I 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.