Last fall, Rory Waterman, a British writer, interviewed me for Poets' Quarterly, and the issue has just come out. Since we are separated by time and the Atlantic, he sensibly decided to conduct the interview by email rather than telephone. His method was to ask me a question, wait for my answer, and then ask me another question based on my previous response. The result was a conversation that, to me, seems both natural and considered. I think it's my favorite interview yet.

Phone and recorded interviews make me nervous because I know I have a tendency to burst into flibbertigibbet enthusiasm and to make snap pronouncements that I regret later. Also, transcription errors can be a problem. The Sewanee Review interview, for instance, says that I chop wood. I don't chop wood. My husband and now my older son split firewood. I split kindling and carry firewood. The difference might seem small if you're not firewood-dependent, but for those of us who are, it's a traditional male-female division of labor that I find disturbing in a feminist kind of way yet reassuring in a "one more thing I don't have to do" kind of way. Sometimes I think that's how these labor divisions arose in the first place: maybe they were a predictable way of divvying up the jobs and thus avoiding a " but I thought YOU were going to do it" catastrophe.

Anyway, off to another day of editing and bread baking. I hope you are warm and that no one has forgotten to split your firewood.