As the only girl growing up for a long time with only boys, as you pointed out, it seems like I was always surrounded by guys. There was this sense in which my female body was a problem.

I always wanted to be pretty as a girl, although I believed it was not possible.

[My muse] she's impatient with me, because I don't do what I should do: sit down and write.

The crows live in the world like you do. They are part of nature.

Some Asian American male scholars have claimed this muse to be Guong Goong, God of Literature, and, simultaneously, although not coincidentally or triflingly, God of War, but I did not have such a gendered muse in mind then.

Particularly in relationship to my father - there's something that daughters, girl children, do almost instinctually in their relationships with their father, so that physically, those boundaries must be respected and never crossed.

"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.