ou write in the first and third person with equal facility. How do know when you are using the appropriate narrative voice?
When I start to write, I start reading aloud right away. I do it for consistency, and also to keep myself going. A number of stories are written in the third person, and I don't even know why, or why one story is an "I" story and the other is a "she" story.
But if you're not blocked, you know you're doing the right thing. If I were wrong, if I were writing in third person and I suddenly got blocked, it would be really serious. It would mean I either had the wrong voice, or the wrong person was telling the story. That happens sometimes. Then I get stuck at the third page, for a year, two years sometimes, with a story I really wanted to write and I can't write it. The wrong person is telling the story and it takes me a long time to figure it out.
At what point did you say to yourself, "Now I am a writer"?
I never said that. I wrote a lot of poems when I was younger, so I knew that I would be writing poems all my life. But when I started to write stories, it was finishing that first story that made me think, well, I've done something. I did one, now I suppose I could do another.
When I write the first sentence, I really don't know if I'm making a poem or a story. But by the time I'm at my third line, I know what it's going to be, it has made its own form. I was requested to write a novel after my first book came out. And I did spend two years trying to write one, I felt I should do that. But I saw that it was really bad, so I didn't see any sense in going on with it.
There's a sense that literature is in jeopardy, that we are witnessing a demise in American literature. What do you make of this?
To me it seems a most particularly interesting time in American literature, and a particularly interesting time for the country. With all the other troubles we have and disasters that are coming our way -- which are real, I don't make light of them at all -- we also have, for the first time in the last 10 or15 years, the voices of all the people who are living in this place and who plan to stay here. You have great Native American writers, you have Spanish voices, all kinds of Asian literature, a number of African-American women writing, and African-American men as well. These books are great, and really very important.
What's happening in publishing is happening to everybody, and that is that publishers are eating each other up, just like all the companies are eating each other up. We live in this amazing system, I believe it's called capitalism, where as soon as some company fires 30 people Wall Street goes all the way up. I don't even see how people can read that and not feel horror.
Any observations on the spoken word revolution?
I love reading aloud, and I taught that way at Sarah Lawrence. I had my students read aloud in class all the time. I didn't like anyone in the class to have copies of anything because I wanted people to learn how to listen as much as I wanted them to learn how to write.
I don't see it as a revolution particularly. There were readers all over New York when I was younger. They didn't call themselves a spoken word revolution, they were just people who really wrote to read aloud. And that was happening a lot then. I know now there are readings all over the city, more than I can get to, and there are people doing different kinds of things.
I believe in people reading aloud and I believe in people speaking aloud. I love that part. But I do believe in the page also. How else can a kid sit in a corner by herself and read a book and live inside that world? I don't want that to pass. It's too private and too delicious a part of my own adolescence, and my children's.