"Stop Already" is a fairly new poem in a group that was just published by Feminist Studies, which is why I sent them to you.

Even my novels offer passages in which the major character is imagined as a writer. In Joss and Gold, Li An is a business writer who edits her company's weekly public relations magazine. And in Sister Swing, Suyin writes human interest stories for a free, local community paper, The Asian Time.

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.

The judges who awarded the 1980 Commonwealth Poetry Prize to my first collection of poems, Crossing the Peninsula and Other Poems, cited with approval and with no apparent conscious irony my early poem, "No Alarms." The poem was composed probably sometime in 1974 or 1975, and it complained about the impossibility of writing poetry - of being a poet - under the conditions in which I was living then.

In some ways it is absurd for me to assert, counter to evidence, that I have not been writing.

At a certain point, the struggles with teaching and mothering and so on and so forth, those decline, those lessen.

Sometimes, in my published complaints about not being a writer, I have recalled the prospect - the yearning to be a writer - as it first formed for me.