Saul Bellow has that character in Henderson the Rain King say: "I want, I want, I want!"9 I remember reading this passage years ago and thinking, yes, that's the human.

New formalism is writing with language as flow, like the flow from a dam, running through a desert that has had no rain for decades.

It is true that my characters have sex.

[My muse] she's impatient with me, because I don't do what I should do: sit down and write.

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.

The crows that are predatory are something you have to deal with. For me, they also become associated with cancer cells.

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