Poetry for me is very easy. It's like a lightning bolt. I feel this calling, and the first line of the poem comes into my head, and I just have to go to the page, to the typewriter, to the computer or whatever and write it.

Never was my political stance determined by the men I was with. I had my own ideas.

I am convinced that the reason why my kids have become very fulfilled and achieving human beings is because I wasn't raising them alone.

It had never crossed my mind that a man could think he had the right to stop me from being who I was.

My family was dubbed the loud family, but that was mostly because of my mother.

Once you have a firefighter in your family, your family and the families from his crew become one big extended family.

I've come to see the mosh pit as an apt description of American society - and of my childhood home. I was number nine of ten creative, mostly loud kids competing for airspace.

I always try and be as positive as I can and give people the benefit of the doubt because, in my own experience - seeing myself fall so hard so many times in my life and do so many things where I lost my way so many times - and then people didn't give up on me, like my husband and my family.