In Among the White Moon Faces, I wrote about my desire to be a writer as rooted in my obsessive hours of reading English novels and poetry. It was that spur, that desire, that pushed me to set aside love and marriage in my early twenties.

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.

Emerging into writership, I have plans to discover my other themes, of nation and country, love and conflict, the body and transcendence, mutilation and wholeness, starvation and wicked plenty, and more. That is, I am already thinking ahead to more writing.

[Cancer] didn't make me more intense about not working more and just having fun more. It didn't do that either. 

Even after the mothering dropped because my son grew up, the writing - the muse - was always the third wheel, the lowest on the priority list.

It's why muse is so impatient with me. I don't ever go to her until after the teaching or whatever is over.

As a female in a home with a whole bunch of brothers and being very close to my father, without a mother and later having a hostile relationship with my stepmother, there were all kinds of Freudian issues rising from possessing a female body that I had to negotiate with no guidance, and I did this negotiation almost instinctually.