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.

You need to be distracted.

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

Sometimes, in my published complaints about not being a writer, I have recalled the prospect - the yearning to be a writer - as it first formed for me.

Philosophy is a bad master for poetry; religion worse; and politics self-serving will never serve the Muse.

My brothers were my peers, but they were not the preeminent male figures in my emotional life.

I feel compassionate, because I know [students] all have to go down this road of suffering and it's going to be tough.