I said that I like to write on trains and that I wished Amtrak had residencies for writers.

My literary heroes were mostly women writers and thinkers - Joy Williams, Joan Didion, Anne Sexton, June Jordan, Sarah Schulman, Audre Lorde, Cherrie Moraga, Christa Wolf - and much of this writing was political as well as literary.

I've known the poet Eileen Myles since the 1990s, when I first moved to New York, and I remember seeing her walking her Pit Bull Rosie around the East Village. She had these beautiful arms and David Cassidy hair and the sort of swagger so many of the gay boys I knew wished we had. We all had crushes on her.

I sat down to try to write 'Edinburgh,' an autobiographical novel, and that took five years to write and two years to sell.

I had been in a professional boys' choir, and as a boy soprano, you're aware that your voice has an expiration date.

When you're bi-racial, in the town I was in, in Maine, people kept asking, 'What are you?' It was like I wasn't even human.