For a while they wore suits or pants suits, and pants suits are kind of a women's appropriation of male costume, work costume. For me, it wasn't Western feminism or the Western workspace. It was my growing up in a house with a bunch of boys, so that male costuming just became my mode of appropriation way before, you know, Betty Friedan came along.

My recent retirement from full-time teaching to the status of research professor at University of California-Santa Barbara (UCSB) encouraged me to come out, so to speak.

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

The problem of the female body is not something that I've studied, but my memoir does treat that theme.

After Fifty Shades of Grey, I think my writing is pretty tame, isn't it?

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.

It's as if I'm setting aside the husband and son, you know, the patriarchal world, for the world of the muse. This is the world of writing.