I would say I'd rather dig a ditch, you know, do hard, manual labor than write lyrics.

I can't remove the autobiographical slant from the things I write. You always bring yourself into what you're writing.

Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.

I'm on this search trying to figure out exactly who I am and what I have to say to people.

I was shy. Bookish. The kind of 13-year-old girl who, instead of having a boyfriend, would have a crush on a dead, 19th-century author!

Literature gives us a window into other people's experiences in other places, in other times, so I thought it would be really interesting to investigate how different people had written about motherhood, and childhood.