For years following the death of my mother, I wanted to write about her. I started writing what I thought of as personal essays about growing up as her child, but I never could finish any of them. I think I was too close to that loss, and too eager to try and resolve things, to make her death make sense.

I know my curiosity as a writer and as a person makes me really interested in moving to parts of the country that I haven't explored through writers' festivals or through the kind of campus visits that I do on a regular basis and engaging with people who may be readers of poetry and may not.

I want to just go to places where writers don't usually go, where people like me don't usually show up, and say, 'Here are some poems. Do they speak to you? What do you hear in them?'

When my father died, those years when he was working on the Hubble came back to me, and it seemed fitting to imagine him as having somehow merged with the large mystery that the universe represents.

It worries me that undergrads and high school students are forced into books they aren't ready for, like Faulkner's, and then they are afraid of putting their toes in the water again.

My parents themselves both went to university, and they very much expected me to be an intellectual and go through further education, and it's to kind of their surprise that I became an athlete.

Critics at their best are independent voices; people take seriously their responsibility to see as many things as they can see, put them in the widest possible perspective, educate their readers. I really do think of myself as a teacher.

Somehow, there is this feeling that women require remedial financial education, and so everything must be dumbed down. The reality is that we all need a lot more education, but guys just go ahead and invest anyway.