I'm surrounded by men, and the muse is complaining that I have neglected her.

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.

Poetics is a science for stammering poets.

When someone asks me now, "What do you do?" I will be able to say, "I am a writer."

I had a couple of Asian readers and other folks tell me, "Oh, you have a lot of sex in your writing."

What happens when a female writer invokes a female muse? Does something else happen? With Sappho's figures of desire, we have a different lesbian energy.

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.