I do not think a similar goal, to attain fame, drove me when I was a child and young woman.

Philosophy is a bad master for poetry; religion worse; and politics self-serving will never serve the Muse.

Breath and brevity are sisters; the long-winded is an enemy who muffles your heartbeat.

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

Free verse is chained in sentence-to-sentence links and breaks free in line breaks.

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.

I guess my writing through time has focused on a number of dimensions that reflect separately on the meaning and social place of the female body.