I came to realize this weird projection: you are much more passionate about hating something outside of you when you know that something is also in you.

When someone asks me now, "What do you do?" I will be able to say, "I am a writer."

Of course, among the confused motives that spurred me toward being a writer was also the desire to look, to be above the trees and rooftops, beyond the Malaysian horizon that circumscribed my life.

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

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.

"I want to be always happy," Maxine Hong Kingston announces . But, as this interview makes clear, for me, it was the desire to write poetry that kept me discontented, if not depressed and unhappy, through what many casual biographers have characterized as successful and productive decades.

"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.