I was nine when I first knew I wanted to be a writer, in particular, a poet.

If you've been in a symbolic struggle long enough, even when the struggle is over, you don't know it's over.

There are a couple of poems I've written with masculine muses, very often the muse to me is a female.

You need to be distracted.

I don't know where to place my body. Everyone notices that about me. I'm very restless.

In Sister Swing, the two sisters have boyfriends and they go to bed with them, but the descriptions are not graphic. They're minimal. The sex is not graphic in the way that DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover has all these graphic passages.

One arrives at a recognition that one needs to be distracted.