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.

The problem of the female body is not something that I've studied, but my memoir does treat that theme.

People called me a tomboy. That was the term used then. I was very much someone who was comfortable in male clothing, and even later when I grew up, I was constantly wearing dungarees, wearing guy shirts.

Even my novels offer passages in which the major character is imagined as a writer. In Joss and Gold, Li An is a business writer who edits her company's weekly public relations magazine. And in Sister Swing, Suyin writes human interest stories for a free, local community paper, The Asian Time.

Even after the mothering dropped because my son grew up, the writing - the muse - was always the third wheel, the lowest on the priority list.

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.

I only submit the poems I think are the strongest.