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.

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.

Sometimes, in my published complaints about not being a writer, I have recalled the prospect - the yearning to be a writer - as it first formed for me.

Agency over one's sexual self - and the articulation of that kind of agency - might seem transgressive to readers who don't expect it in a woman's text.

It's as if I'm setting aside the husband and son, you know, the patriarchal world, for the world of the muse. This is the world of writing.

New formalism is writing with language as flow, like the flow from a dam, running through a desert that has had no rain for decades.

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