1. After college, you taught English in a coal mining village on the Czech/Polish border. What did this experience teach you about yourself?

When I was an undergrad at Notre Dame, I lived with three wonderful roommates, and we were very close, very affectionate. And at home I had a very loving family. My environments were all nurturing and kind. Perhaps this is why, as graduation neared, I felt like I needed a challenge. I wrote away to five Eastern European Embassies asking for a job, and I took the job that sounded hardest. Suddenly I was teaching, which I'd never done before, and living alone, which I'd never done before, and learning a new language, which I'd never done before, and all of this is a culture that was highly suspicious of foreigners and not very welcoming, at least at the start. This was 1993, and people were starting to go to Prague, but to coal mining village where I lived was very isolated, polluted, communist, and depressed. I think that most of what I learned that year came out of the experience of spending so much time by myself--really learning to be alone, and often lonely. Looking more deeply into myself, my reserves than I had before. And learning how it feels to be on the outside of things, to be an observer, sometimes an unwelcome one. All of this, I believe, strengthened in me the desire to be a writer.

2. How has your life changed since the release of Tender Hooks in 2004?

The biggest change in my personal life has been the birth of my son, Thomas, in june of 2005. My husband and I have also really put our weight down into our life here in Mississippi. It feels good to have a permanent job after the rough road of getting started in academia, the years in which we'd have short term fellowships or visiting teaching positions and then move on. We’ve settled down in Oxford, MS, which feels like a really good fit for us. We've bought a house and planted bulbs--what a luxury--all my years of renting, I never allowed myself to plant bulbs because I never knew if I'd still be living there when they finally bloomed.

3.Howdid the idea for Great With Child come about?
Before I moved to MS, I taught at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. During one poetry workshop I taught a student named Kathleen who wrote several moving poems about her mother, dying of cancer. Kathleen ended up leaving mid-semester to return to Georgia to care for her mother. I was pregnant, and when I gave birth during finals week, Kathleen sent a quilt that she and her mother had pieced during the long evenings in the hospital.
Over the next two years, Kathleen and I stayed in touch. I emailed her about moving to Oxford, Mississippi, with my husband and our newborn daughter, and teaching at the University of Mississippi. Her emails told of her mother’s death and then, later, the meeting of a handsome graduate student, Robert. They fell in love, as people do in this good world, and got married. Robert, studying marine biology, was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship in Alaska. She and Robert visited us before they moved, and it was at our house that Kathleen realized she was pregnant. She panicked--with both parents dead and her friends in Georgia soon to be far away, who would help her, who would coach her through? Well, it turned out, I would. In part to stop her leaking mascara onto my shoulder, I pledged to write her daily. I fell far short of that goal, but I did enjoy exchanging letters, both because doing so bolstered our friendship, weaving us into that grand circle of women giving and getting advice about children, and also because it let me shape my own reflections about pregnancy and child rearing.
A few months after Kathleen gave birth, her friend Carole got pregnant, and Kathleen asked if Carole could read my letters. I thought they might be too specific and personal to be of interest, but it seems I was wrong, for a few months later Carole asked if she could share them with a new pregnant friend. This went on for a while. One day, I was on the phone with my editor at Norton, and she asked me how my book of poems was coming. "I'm not writing," I told her, then rephrased--"Well, I'm not writing poems, only these letters . . ." I told her the story and she was interested in reading the letters. And shortly thereafter I had a book deal for a book I didn't even know I was writing. It was pretty lucky and magical, actually.

4. Do you write every day?
I do try to write every day, in the morning, because I find that if I haven't scheduled the writing in as part of my day, the time for it evaporates. I have to commit to it and clear space for it if it's going to happen.

5. You've offered the advice to new writers to read constantly and read aloud. What are the benefits of reading aloud to a writer?
I do believe that reading aloud is crucially important to any writer, particularly a beginning one, because poetry is an oral art form. I sometimes think of it as music where the only instrument playing is the human voice. Poetry takes place at the moment the air rises in our windpipe and rolls out of our mouths, fills our own ears, and any listener's. A strange alchemy happens when the poem is read aloud that allows the writer to perceive it more purely, with more distance. Sometimes I've finished--or thought I've finished--a poem, only to read it aloud and suddenly wince at a wretched line. Why I couldn't hear that line's wretchedness until read aloud, I don't know, but I find this to be true again and again.

6. What is your proudest literary accomplishment?
I felt deeply honored to be asked to read my poetry at the Library of Congress at the invitation of the poet laureate then, Billy Collins. I also felt deeply proud to have been invited to read at my alma mater, in front of my former professors who were so kind to me. But when I think of my proudest literary accomplishment, somehow I think of a comics and novelty shop that used to be on Dickson St. in Fayetteville, AR, where I got my MFA. They sold all sorts of comics on a rack there, even locally written ones that they'd sell on consignment. I had a chapbook of poems and wished I had some outlet for it, so I asked the managed if I could leave some there to sell on consignment beside the comic books. She looked dubious, but agreed. A few weeks later I went back in to pick up the chapbooks, but they weren't on the counter. My first thought was that someone had put them away because they weren't selling. It turned out, however, that they were gone because they'd all been sold. I was shocked. And then the store owner asked me if I'd written all of those poems, and said she liked them. The she said something I've never forgotten. She said, "I'd never read a book of poetry before. I think I'd like to read another." That's a pretty great thing to have.

7. What is a literary goal that you haven't yet achieved?
You don't have room for me to list all of the literary goals I haven't accomplished yet! For example, I apply every year to the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholarship, an award that gives a poet money to live abroad for a year, and every year I don't get the award, though I keep trying. There are a dozen things like that I could name. But perhaps the deepest literary goal I haven't accomplished yet is to write my best work, which I hope is in my future, and which I hope I've worked hard enough to be ready for when it comes.

8. You've been quotes as saying that poetry needs an advertising campaign. What is something you'd like people to know about poetry?
That it can change your life.