It is true that my characters have sex.

My muse is very often, in my mind, a nagger. She nags me.

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.

As a female in a home with a whole bunch of brothers and being very close to my father, without a mother and later having a hostile relationship with my stepmother, there were all kinds of Freudian issues rising from possessing a female body that I had to negotiate with no guidance, and I did this negotiation almost instinctually.

What happens when a female writer invokes a female muse? Does something else happen? With Sappho's figures of desire, we have a different lesbian energy.

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.

"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.