Except for the usual house chores, doing income tax, etc., I am free to write whenever I want.

I find that biographical material holds me back, hampers my creative process, cramps my imagination.

That is one more reason why I write in English only right now. I prefer writing in the language I hear around me for the people by whom I am surrounded.

In fact, the very phrase "teaching creative writing" sounds to me oxymoronic. How can you teach someone to be creative?

I was always creatively stubborn, adverse to editing by others, and wanted to use the kind of Ukrainian we spoke among ourselves rather than the more artificial prescribed literary Ukrainian. The problem was the greatest in prose, where editors would change my language because "it sounded better this way." My poetry they left alone probably out of deference to that hallowed genre.

Imagination is so much more fertile than life.

Except for the usual house chores, doing income tax, etc., I am free to write whenever I want.