1. Minnesota, New York, Paris, Idaho, Montana...You've been everywhere! Where did you begin and how did you end up in Missoula?

When I was young there were special youth fares with the airlines, and I had a huge and insatiable desire to see the world so I worked as a bus girl and a waitress all summer, and then each winter set out to see the world, studying the language of the place as much as possible. After I published my first collection of poetry I moved to New York (from Minnesota where I grew up) and began working for Teachers & WritersCollaborative as a resident poet in the schools. Nancy Shapiro, my boss, Director of T&W sent me first to the new York School for the Deaf where I learned my sign language skills and then sent me to Salmon, Idaho where I worked in the schools and community. Once I discovered the West, I loved it and when I met my husband Bob I knew I belonged here in Missoula.

2. In all of the four sections of your book there is one constant: Arlene.We all fall in love with her. Who is she?

When I was five years old I met Arlene, our new neighbor, and she literally gave herself to me; her aspirations, (travel, language, literature, dishes and vases) and called me a free spirit, which was a pretty rare term in 1959. Arlene gave me a better life, a bigger life than my family could. After she got into her nineties her bones began breaking and she ended up in various hospitals and nursing homes wherre her condition worsened with neglect. She was in Minneapolis, I was in Missoula, and I flew home every chance I got. She spoke to me about death, and life, and the fact that she would never leave me, that death would not come between us, and it didn't. She continues in my dreams and at extreme moments of fear.

3. Obviously, teaching is an important part of your creative life and your students figure largely in your poetry. What has teaching children, deaf and hearing both, meant to you?

It was my fifth grade teacher who told me I could have a life as a writer. She helped me to rewrite my own life and future. I remember the one line she said to me that actually determined the outcome of my future! She said, "You could be a Hemingway or Socrates." I know that it takes just one adult to give a child a chance no one else can. Teaching children poetry, both hearing and deaf, has enhanced my own work because my young students are so fresh, so new, so honest, and they have a deep love for the world and its creatures. Children have taught me as much about poetry as any professor.

4. Tell us about your CD-Jumbo Love Cycle (The Stories Project-1996).

My C.D,, Jumbo Love Cycle, came about during a season of insomnia. Every time I paced my house and looked out the window at the mountain behind my house, Mt. Jumbo, there would be something spectacular going on. During the day when I hiked the hill with my dogs, I had repeated spiritual and euphoric experiences, either from leanings toward Nirvana or lack of oxygen, and I wrote about twenty poems about these experiences. Then Missoula decided to purchase Mt. Jumbo and keep it as habitat for the animls that live there. Some musician friends asked me to join them in a spoken word tape for the local radio station. They loved my love poems to Jumbo Mountain and I loved their music. Harp, violin, didgeredoo, drums and bowls and wind chimes joined with my Jumbo poetry and we went on to make a C.D. Our town did buy the mountain, its habitat and free space forever, and I had the time of my life working in the studio with the musicians.

5. What and who are your influences?

Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, T.S. Eliot, Anne Carson, Edgar Allen Poe, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Auden, Adrienne Rich, Rimbaud, Sharon Olds, Jorie Graham, Jane Hirschfield, Sandra Alcosser, William Staford, Luise Gluck, Norman Dubie, Mary Oliver, Frank O'Hara, Sappho, Lucille Clifton, W.S. Merwin, PabloNeruda, nature, dogs, Jumbo Mountain, yoga, Buddhism, children, and my husband, my soul mate.

6. What does winning the William Stafford Memorial Poetry award mean to you?

Many books of poetry disappear. They are small, they don't make the bestseller list, they receive no attention, and many poets who should be heard are not. This award gives my book new life, new attention, validity, hope, validation and a deeply profound satisfaction!

7. Independent booksellers always want to know. What are you reading?

Anne Carson, "Glass, Irony and God', anything by Barbara Kingsolver and Sharon Olds "The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry". "Smilla's Sense of Snow" by Peter Hoeg is a perennial favorite, anything by Kaye Gibbons, Flannery O'Connor and anything by Rumi.