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

When people say "the body," frequently they mean the literal body, the physical body.

The crows live in the world like you do. They are part of nature.

I'm surrounded by men, and the muse is complaining that I have neglected her.

Note, the reply will not be "I write," an act that I have, after all, been performing since I was nine.

As a first-generation "Asian American woman," for one thing, I knew there was no such thing as an "Asian American woman." Within this homogenizing labeling of an exotica, I knew there were entire racial/national/cultural/sexual-preferenced groups, many of whom find each other as alien as mainstream America apparently finds me.

From the world of the muse and writing, there will come, hopefully, the book. You're right, for me, that the muse is always female, and the book comes from a separate gender dimension than the concrete male world that, as you pointed out, has been surrounding me since I was an infant.