The consciousness of one's physical self had to be repressed because, socially, the female body was so visible, an ongoing provocation and incitement of specular curiosity and fascination.

Free verse is chained in sentence-to-sentence links and breaks free in line breaks.

When I spoke at the 2012 Contemporary Women Writers' Conference in Taipei, I thought it offered an appropriate moment and site to announce my new manifesto10 and profession - to be a writer.

I'm always resisting [my muse]. I'm resisting her power.

Wouldn't that be wonderful if I could do that? And that way, I could walk with the muse, rather than walk without her. The novel would write itself.

Is there a term that one might use rather than say that one is homosexual? Is there a different physical gender and symbolic dimension? I'm thinking of Adrienne Rich's notion of the lesbian spectrum. It's not as if sexual identity is binary: one must be either homo or hetero.

For a while they wore suits or pants suits, and pants suits are kind of a women's appropriation of male costume, work costume. For me, it wasn't Western feminism or the Western workspace. It was my growing up in a house with a bunch of boys, so that male costuming just became my mode of appropriation way before, you know, Betty Friedan came along.