In various memoir pieces, I have traced the trajectory of yearning through decisions made, good and bad, that had somehow kept the ambition on track.

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

Is there a term that one might use rather than say that one is homosexual? Is there a different physical gender and symbolic dimension? I'm thinking of Adrienne Rich's notion of the lesbian spectrum. It's not as if sexual identity is binary: one must be either homo or hetero.

The things that I dislike passionately, I have come to realize, are also part of me.

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.

In actual fact, I have been an academic - a college and university teacher and scholar - for much of the last 45 years, and only rarely a writer.

Heterosexuality - whichever gender you are - says that the other gender is very important to you.