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

With so many brothers, I could always find a pair of shorts to borrow and run around in.

[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.

As I grew older - and even when I was younger - it had puzzled me why I continued and continue to be heterosexual.

I don't like crows. In the poem "C," crows are predatory, killing other birds and so forth. But in my morning walks, there were always crows, particularly at certain times of the year. And they're very aggressive, very visible and loud. They're not at all likable, but they have to be dealt with. They are part of the picture, the art in the morning. You cannot deny their reality.

Even today, I'm much more comfortable dressed in a male kind of way.

In the poem "C," the crows are associated with cancer, because I had suffered a cancer scare.