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

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.

According to [Maxine Hong] Kingston, the prose writer is "a workhorse."

My brothers were my peers, but they were not the preeminent male figures in my emotional life.

When someone asks me now, "What do you do?" I will be able to say, "I am a writer."

New formalism is writing with language as flow, like the flow from a dam, running through a desert that has had no rain for decades.

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.