John Milton famously claimed, "Fame is the spur" for the poet, and indeed when we consider the six years he spent writing Paradise Lost, and the additional years revising it, from 1664 to 1674, we may allow that spur.

[Irony] has everything to do with what Tillie Olsen so powerfully imagined in her short story, "As I Stand Here Ironing" and elaborates on polemically in her 1978 book, Silences, in a chapter first delivered as a talk in 1967. As Olsen clearly saw it for women, my not being a writer was a material consequence of my being a woman - a wife, mother, housewife, and a certain kind of feminist teacher - attentive, one-on-one, face-to-face, nurturing, the kind who receives high ESCI evaluation scores from undergraduates and graduate students.

This distraction is what one wants, which is very, very bad for the muse, because the muse hates not being in the line of sight. It's no longer an external conflict, like, oh, I have all these demands and I don't like them. The split is in the self. This may explain why, when I was in Santa Barbara before I went to Singapore and then now to Hong Kong, there was a writing moment when I was writing a poem a day. I had never done that before.

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

If the act of writing is the act of putting aside the masculine, then you might in that way, it may sound almost crazy to say this, say that the act of writing, for a woman, could be a homosexual act.

Once you stop talking about the female body empowering itself vis-à-vis male forays or invasions or male demands or the necessity to respond to husband and son to bring the issue down to a more concrete level, the body is a different manifestation physically.

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.