I grew up in a household where reading was encouraged. My mother believed in the power of words, and my father obviously did too.

I don't remember my father reading to me, but I remember him telling me bedtime stories. I got to pick what was in them, and then he'd make them up.

My mother is, my father certainly was. They were kind of the local intelligentsia in the town where I grew up.

I was encouraged by my mother and, to a lesser extent, by my father.

I never thought I'd be doing poetry books. I never really studied poetry. But the first one I did was after my mother died, and I realized that people sort of think and talk about her style and fashion, but in fact, what made her the person she was was really her love of reading and ideas.

I grew up listening to my father argue politics into the night and taking trips every Saturday to the Hood River library where my mother maintained her interest in reading and encouraged the same from her sons.