Where is all this leading, you ask, and what does it have to do with FLOWERS OF THE DESERT? Well, I didn’t meet those flowers until July 1967. (By the way, FLOWERS OF THE DESERT was not my title for the book. In fact like most authors, I’m guessing, I went into a bookshop and asked if they carried FLOWERS OF THE DESERT. They sent me to the horticultural shelf. The whole experience of getting that book published was a nightmare with the worst editor any author could ever have. She lacked complete understanding of the culture I was trying to represent.)

Do you have the life you want? When you were a child, did you dream of commanding the space shuttle or perhaps having the perfect wedding with twenty bridesmaids, all size 4. Maybe you were good in sports and had dreams of an Olympic medal. Or played the flute and thought, if James Galway could do it, why not me?

I love bad poetry. I’ve written bad poetry. In fact, when I was in college, Donald Hall used one of my poems in class as an example of bad poetry. Thank you, Donald. I appreciated that. However, in my second semester of poetry writing, X. J. Kennedy used a poem of mine as an example of, I guess what one could call, “acceptable” poetry. So I can learn.

What do you owe a father you’ve never known? Julian Billings asks himself that question when he discovers he’s the son of an artist.  Not a famous artist, a mediocre artist on the verge of discovery when the inevitable happens.

Does art imitate life?  Oh, yeah, I know the question should be reversed, but I find events in my life flowing into my—“art?”  Let’s just call it “writings.”

I had finished writing “The Moroccan” while my husband was on sabbatical in Israel.

How did I come to write THE WANKER. The truth of the matter is that I never really know how I come to write anything.