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.

Emerging into writership, I have plans to discover my other themes, of nation and country, love and conflict, the body and transcendence, mutilation and wholeness, starvation and wicked plenty, and more. That is, I am already thinking ahead to more writing.

These commonplace categories - wife, mother, housewife, teacher - are in fact teleological referents. They gesture to profound states of being that animate, absorb and saturate the subject, like indelible dyes spilled repeatedly over a plain fabric. No matter if the fabric is sturdy or delicate, translucent or opaque, those dyes will stain. They will color the days and years and life.

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.

According to [Maxine Hong] Kingston, the prose writer is "a workhorse."

It is true that my characters have sex.

I also wanted to be like my brothers, physically, and yet not physically. So I would constantly - and I think nowadays it's taken for granted that this is what girlfriends do - I would constantly wear their shorts, put on their shirts. That did not seem odd because we were desperately poor for quite a while. It wasn't as if pretty little girlie things were available to me.