How did you get your start in creative writing?  I started classes in creative writing and photography at Northeast Community College back in 1980, after deciding that sorting mail all night, six nights...

How did you get into writing? When I was 19 years old, I wandered into a poetry slam team performance at a coffeehouse in Albuquerque, my hometown, and was hooked when I saw the team performing a poem...

How has your family inspired your writing? My family didn’t exactly inspire my writing as much as it provided raw material for writing. My writing is usually triggered by or suggested by interactions...

What do you find easiest about writing? This is an interesting question since I feel like we writers often focus on the hardest aspects of writing. I suppose for me the easiest part about writing is...

What inspired you to write Gathering Place? What notions appear in Gathering Place are those which have shown up in most of my writing. The fact that the book, a first, is published quite late in my...

How did your book Mass for Shut-Ins come about? Several years ago, Greg Kosmicki, founder and editor of Backwaters Press, said he’d like to publish my next book. I held him at bay for a time, knowing...

How did your book frontpew@paradise come about? I’d had frontpew@paradise in mind for the title early on and couldn’t shake it. It went through a dozen permutations while I wrote and collected the...

How did your book Points of Entry come about? After seeing the movie, Bright Star, about the life of John Keats, I became obsessed with the line "Touch has a memory." And it wasn’t the first time...

How did your latest book, What Bob Says (Some More), come about? I wrote the first Bob poem at the Elkhorn Cabin with my writing buddies—Cabin Girls—we meet once a season at Kehm's beautiful cabin...