If an artist is driven primarily by social responsibility, I think the art probably suffers because, again, just as leadership has a rather defined end point or purpose, social responsibility would seem to have a very clear moral context.

I'm trying to write poems that involve beginning at a known place, and ending up at a slightly different place. I'm trying to take a little journey from one place to another, and it's usually from a realistic place, to a place in the imagination.

The pen is an instrument of discovery rather than just a recording implement. If you write a letter of resignation or something with an agenda, you're simply using a pen to record what you have thought out.

I am increasingly attracted to restricting possibility in the poem by inflicting a form upon yourself. Once you impose some formal pattern on yourself, then the poem is pushing back. I think good poems are often the result of that kind of wrestling with the form.

People on the edge of love go with their heart and not their head.

I'd gone to Wellesley College, an amazing women's college where the students were encouraged to follow our dreams. However, after I graduated and had a historical romance published, more than a few people indicated that, in some way, my career choice was a 'waste' of so much education.

I don't know what my version of a relationship or marriage is yet, because the typical model seems a little broken to me.

I've been married one time and I have one daughter, who I love more than anyone in the world. And that's where my world is.