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

Singing has nothing to do with poetry, except as twins separated at birth.

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.

Even today, I'm much more comfortable dressed in a male kind of way.

Rather, the collapsing between act and condition, "I am" with "I do," feels like authenticity, an authenticity of being. The muse rewarded me for a few months, after April of 2012, by giving me poems, almost a poem each day, that I can claim as coming from my writer's status.

I'm not sure why my muse is female, except when I am deliberately playing against that figure.

Note, the reply will not be "I write," an act that I have, after all, been performing since I was nine.