Many artists and authors are creative in multiple disciplines. What other types of art do you create?
“I made sculpture as a painter,” said Matisse, “to order my sensations…”  Similarly, I think I make visual art as a writer.  I’ve also performed occasionally– singing, acting, even a bit of dancing.  But I find that no matter what a particular artistic practice opens up in me– whether it be a memory, a new sense of rhythm, or a particular attention to color or framing– it eventually gets called into service on the page.  

I do sometimes borrow from other artistic vocabularies in my writing, but the symbiosis is often more mysterious than direct.  For instance, I love how open to failure I am in other art forms!  I can laugh at a collapsed bowl on the pottery wheel, and shrug off any awkwardness in dance class.  I find that so freeing.  And I want to invite that sense of freedom and light-heartedness to enter into my writing life as well.

How has your view of the creative process changed since you first started?
I had a pretty difficult relationship with my poems in the beginning. In fact, in the early ‘90s, I had the opportunity to drive the poet Brigit Pegeen Kelly to her teaching post in Irvine from San Diego, where I was living and she was visiting. During the drive, she pressed me a bit about why I wasn’t eager to get my MFA, and I remember saying, “Because then I would have to be a poet.” The public part of being a poet was just too scary, and, to be honest, it often still is.  

I’ve thankfully expanded my younger, more stereotypical view of what it looks like to “be” a poet in the world–and that of course extends to my process, too. I don’t need to be despondent to write, and I don’t get (as) angsty when the words aren’t flowing now either.  Experience has taught me that the tap will usually turn back on if I keep showing up with a bucket.  

What author or artist’s popularity do you find confusing/inexplicable?
Oh, I don’t want to name any one artist, but I used to find the appeal of K-Pop to be perplexing…  To me, the performances seemed completely devoid of any spontaneity or surprise. However, last year I had a fourth grade student who knew all the moves, and I respected the seriousness with which many of the other students in our class tried to learn them. The girls would actually practice poses of heartbreak!  Sure, it was all very predictable, and the gender roles were pretty hard for me to swallow, but I began to see the emotional mechanics of it all in a new light.  I don’t know, maybe the tightness of the choreography was a kind of ballast to the general chaos of (pre)adolescence.

What piece of creative advice have you received that sounded good, but was ultimately not useful to you?
One of Donald Hall’s books on craft proposed that you should put every poem in a drawer for five years before publishing it. (I’m not even sure now if that’s what the book actually said, but that’s how I absorbed it.) The problem with that advice is that I sometimes have a hard time feeling the fire of a poem after that long– and I rarely find the courage to send a poem out without knowing at least some of that initial spark.

However, turning fifty has changed the way I relate to that part of the process. I think I am just more willing to accept that my work may never feel finished, and I’m more able to revise my earlier poems with a compassion for the woman who wrote them.  “Submersion” is a good example of that, actually.  After a poet friend of mine worried that their life as a writer might get subsumed by a new love, I wrote and sent this poem as response, then sat mulling on it for the requisite 5 years. By the time I went to look at it again, I no longer believed in the claims of the poem, and frankly I was a bit embarrassed by its presumptuousness, especially the tone of certainty at the end. I’d been projecting my own feelings into the poem (and onto my friend) instead of hearing their real concern in our conversation. So, I put it away again. With even more distance, I’m now able to sit with the multiple resonances and failings of the poem– as one that is written both to my friend and to myself, deluded and true.  

And so, here we are discussing it a full fifteen years later as “epiphany, ha!  But then again, it’s the Nonbinary Review, right?  Maybe epiphany was always going to be a bit more complicated... 

Do you have a dedicated or preferred place to work? How does it influence the way you work?  
No. I am writing this while drinking kombucha down the street from my daughter’s school. 

The plus side of having to squeeze into small corners to write is that now I can adapt to a wide range of environments, but that’s not to say it’s ideal.  I still dream of having my library out of storage and a door that closes.  

This year, I’m lucky enough to have been given a space to write at the Seattle Public Library– I mean, talk about books at your fingertips!  There’s a door and a good dictionary.  So, I guess 2025 is my “Year of the Desk.”  I’m not sure how the new space will influence me yet, but I know it will.

If you had unlimited time, what new hobby would you take up?
If time, space and money weren’t an issue, I would take up oil painting. I think I’d choose huge canvases and channel some of my more abstract expressionist tendencies.