My recent retirement from full-time teaching to the status of research professor at University of California-Santa Barbara (UCSB) encouraged me to come out, so to speak.

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.

When I was younger, yes, there was a part of me - and I wrote about that bit in Among the White Moon Faces - that wanted to be a boy. I wanted to be accepted by my brothers and to be their peers.

When people say "the body," frequently they mean the literal body, the physical body.

The city and nature, the built stone and the found stone, concrete and slate, poetry addresses them all democratically.

[Cancer] didn't make me more intense about not working more and just having fun more. It didn't do that either. 

I had a couple of Asian readers and other folks tell me, "Oh, you have a lot of sex in your writing."