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

You've read some of the poems in this new unpublished book [Walker's Alphabet], e.g., the poem "C." I have a number of poems whose titles are letters of the alphabet: A, B, C, D, E, F.

Poetry has roots, and sometimes they are aerial. Sometimes they are buried.

I'm much more comfortable in pants and shirts, running around. There was a typical construction about womanhood when I was growing up that I rejected.

In some ways it is absurd for me to assert, counter to evidence, that I have not been writing.

As I grew older - and even when I was younger - it had puzzled me why I continued and continue to be heterosexual.

I think that's what, to me, also talks about the silences in my work - as a woman, a woman writer, when you say, "no" or you have to say, "no" so often to the writing occasion, those occasions don't really come back.