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.

In Sister Swing, the two sisters have boyfriends and they go to bed with them, but the descriptions are not graphic. They're minimal. The sex is not graphic in the way that DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover has all these graphic passages.

As the only girl growing up for a long time with only boys, as you pointed out, it seems like I was always surrounded by guys. There was this sense in which my female body was a problem.

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.

I have some weak poems in that new collection, which is why I'm not ready to send the collection out yet.

I was writing poems as I was walking. I was able to take that restlessness, that nomadic distraction, and use that distraction in the world and turn that distraction into observations and then into poems.

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