How did you become a writer?

I started writing poems and stories in elementary school. I imagine my inspiration came from reading, and being read to, and then there was a lot of positive reinforcement. Writing was quiet, inexpensive, and I could do it in my room with the door shut, so my parents, who were very busy people, must have liked this. I was an only child, as well, so I had the ideal childhood for solitude and time to think, write, read.

You’ve written eight collections of poetry and nine works of fiction. For many, one genre is less difficult to write than the other. As a successful writer in both genres, do you find the creative process different for each?

Yes, the process is entirely different. I think about a poem for a long time before I sit down to write, and often I have already written most of it in my head or in bits and pieces in notebooks and margins before I sit down to assemble it. When I do sit down to write the poem, there’s quite a lot of anxiety, and if I don’t get at least a sense that it’s on it’s way to being ‘done’ in a first draft, I never get a poem out of it at all. Obviously, you can’t be in a high state of inspiration in order to write a novel, as that takes years. I can’t sit around waiting to be inspired, either, or it would take decades. I write a little every day when I’m working on a novel, and I never expect what I’ll accomplish on any particular day to be any good, and just shrug it off, knowing I have plenty of time to revise, start over, and sit down again the next day.

What was it like to have two novels, The Life Before Her Eyes and Suspicious River, realized into film? Did the final result of each film surprise you in terms of story-line or character changes made?

I was so flattered that films would be made of the novels, that I just enjoyed watching them. It was eerie to see characters that I’d invented in my head actually moving and speaking in the world, and wearing clothes I’d imagined them wearing. Both movies changed the story-lines quite a bit, but I felt there was such faithfulness to the tone and impressions of the novels that this seemed minor to me.

To quote Stephen Burt on your latest collection, Space, in Chains: “no single story controls even a single poem.” Your poems weave the surreal and the subconscious with the “everyday story” which creates work that is particular, fresh, alive. One could say that life is a series of moments shaped by the human impulse or instinct for “story.” Why are we so story-oriented?

I wish I could answer that. I know that we are, of course. I also think we are in search of voices, other “I’s” in the world, and in the poem. I know that when I’m about to hear a story, I’m much more interested, actually, in the person who tells the story than I am in the story itself. If someone comes up and says, “Something incredible just happened to me!”, we really want, first, to know who is about to share the incredible thing, and why. When I read poems, the ones I love the most explain something about the speaker to me in the course of reading, and I think that must have to do with storytelling.

Your novel Be Mine begins with a community college English teacher finding an anonymous love note in her school mailbox. Her husband encourages her to find out who wrote the note and to have the affair. What brought you to write this story?

I knew someone to whom that happened — a secret love note (not the rest of the novel!) I also wanted to write from the point of view of someone who would be learning her own story in the course of the novel. That inspiration of the secret note revealed possibilities for others secrets to me.

Your books are widely read in France. This particular book (published as À moi pour toujours) became a national bestseller there. Any thoughts on why this title was so well-received in France?

No, except that the French, it seems, really do like sexy stuff — that might not just be our American impression of the French — and there’s quite a bit of sex in the novel.

Which is more challenging in terms of teaching creative writing, poetry or fiction?

Poetry! Often why a poem works or doesn’t is as much a mystery to the reader, the teacher, as to the poet. When you’re working to express something in language that can’t be expressed in language — well, that’s a poem, and what makes it work sometimes and not other times is also something that language doesn’t express that well. Stories can be improved in many ways, but poems sometimes simply need to be abandoned, or just work for reasons we can’t express, and teachers like simpler tools than that.

Some writers feel that teaching detracts from their writing, while others feel that teaching creates a kind of synergy. What has your experience been? How do you manage to be so prolific and still find time?

The school year encompasses, always, both of these experiences for me. There are weeks during which I hurry home after teaching to write because I’ve been discussing writing, and am inspired by it. And there are weeks that pass without any time at all to do my own work. I’ve been doing this long enough to know that those more difficult weeks will pass, and no matter what I try to write a little every day. I always have time to eat a little every day, and sometimes I have to eat and write at the same time, but if there’s time to eat there’s time to write.

You have a number of novels about young adults. Why that age group?

My first young adult novel wasn’t intended for young adults, but was marketed that way because — well, because it worked out that way. My second young adult novel was inspired by the first, and realizing suddenly how vast and interesting the young adult literature of the day had become.

New projects?

I’ve just drafted a new novel, and I’m trying to put together a new collection of poetry.