What do you like most about teaching?
I really love it when you’re in a classroom and it just comes alive, and I love it when a student who’s been struggling has a breakthrough, like in a workshop situation and everybody sees it, or when a student writes to the next best level. I just love it when things gel and the class becomes a community.
Who inspired you the most when you were young?
Well, I knew I wanted to be a writer. I loved Shakespeare, I loved the Greek tragedies, as well as Shelley, and Dickinson. And I loved picture books as a kid, way after I learned how to read. And the first humongous book I read after I learned how to read was Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment.”
So if you could meet any author or poet from the past, who would it be?
Well, I would not want to meet [Emily] Dickinson because I don’t think she would like me. I mean, she was withdrawn and I don’t think I could draw her out.
Someone I’d love to meet who’s from the more recent past would be Czeslaw Milosz. He was born in Poland in 1911, and he just died in the last few years, so he was alive and conscious during most of the twentieth century, and has written about it in essays and fiction and mostly poems, and his perspective is amazing. You know those Eastern Europeans who went through so much are totally different from Americans – they consider us naive. To talk to someone who has been through all that and found a way to be affirmative at the same time, I would just love to do that. I would also like to meet [Walt] Whitman.
What’s your favorite holiday?
I like the February ones – all of them – Presidents’ Day and Valentine’s day, and Lent, I like the whole group of them. Because those were two complex but decent presidents – Washington and Lincoln. Valentine’s Day is in there, which is fun. And I like the whole dynamic between Carnival one day and Ash Wednesday the next. Carnival is right before Lent where you let it all out before you have to get the ashes on your forehead and eat fish and give up chocolate and all that. I love the tension between that – the wildness, and then the stripping down to something more somber. Which is really the thing I like about Halloween too, which is the day we let our inner wolf come out – I think people need to admit they have one. But Carnival is just as good, and it’s happier.
What’s your favorite dish to cook?
I love to cook Mexican food – Quesadillas, burritos. I have a slimmed-down version of chilies rellenos, which is just poblano peppers with cheese melted inside. I think that’s my favorite, right now.