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.

Working women went through a time when they believed that.

It's why muse is so impatient with me. I don't ever go to her until after the teaching or whatever is over.

That desire to reach further is also where I ended my memoir, in 1994 in California, perhaps ironically, looking out to the Pacific and back to Asia, toward the not-yet-written.

From the world of the muse and writing, there will come, hopefully, the book. You're right, for me, that the muse is always female, and the book comes from a separate gender dimension than the concrete male world that, as you pointed out, has been surrounding me since I was an infant.

I always wanted to be pretty as a girl, although I believed it was not possible.

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.