The inimitable writer Maxine Hong Kingston published a book in 2002 with the title To Be the Poet. However, in contrast to the transformatory distinctions Kingston makes between the conditions of being a prose writer and "the poet," my multigenre impulses incline me to a broader transformation: to be a writer.

The poem might come to you as you're preparing to teach a lecture, right? And when you say, "no" to that occasion, that poem is gone.

Free verse is chained in sentence-to-sentence links and breaks free in line breaks.

I did not write about that kind of insecurity and anxiety between myself and my brothers, because my father was the dominant male figure as I was growing up in that home.

Now that I'm more middle class, I have access to consumer goods. I do enjoy feminine frippery, feminine doo-da, stuff like that.

Is there a term that one might use rather than say that one is homosexual? Is there a different physical gender and symbolic dimension? I'm thinking of Adrienne Rich's notion of the lesbian spectrum. It's not as if sexual identity is binary: one must be either homo or hetero.

I'm nomadic. Even when I'm a visiting professor here at the City University of Hong Kong, in this campus flat, I'm constantly getting up, sitting down, picking this or that up. You can't do that and be a writer. You need to be able to sit still.