As a translator, I’m responsible for providing information encoded in the text that's more easily accessible to a native reader—and doing it as discreetly as possible.
I’ve been living with these poems for a few years: reading, translating, editing. The editing is difficult because you know it’s the prelude to letting go.
I think we're losing the art of visiting. We're so busy and unwilling to inconvenience someone else because we don’t want to be inconvenienced ourselves.
Revising my very old drafts, I was surprised by certain impulses I had as a young person. I'm surprised by how instinctively feminist I am as a writer.
My advice to a new writer is go where you need to get the support you need to write. Find the cracks where you can get a little juice and live on that.
I might even say humor is the most important thing to me. It's how we understand each other. It’s how we relate to each other. It’s how we mask our pain.
One of the things the Catholic church prepared me to do was to believe in things that were invisible and possibly even farfetched and totally impossible.
The tension between unleashing emotion and controlling emotion is really interesting to me. And theater is a context in which that happens in particularly fascinating ways.
I was bouncing back and forth between people’s individual views about how the story should be told. I just needed to find the person whose vision aligned with my own.
When all is said and done, a novel is a means whereby we impose order on human experience, always leaving to the readers the possibility of reaching their own interpretations.