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I don’t believe there is such a thing as a “non-writing aspect.” Everything influences me and relates to my writing.

The collection piles one surprise on top of the other; just when you feel you’re getting a grasp on what the book is, it subverts your expectations yet again, with a writer who chops off his thumbs, or an act of arson motivated by love, or a society whose members all have two hearts, an upper and a lower.

I like to approach a new story with a question in mind, one that I don’t have an easy answer to.

The poems I write tend to begin and end in a place of faith, though the faith involved is a particularly fluid and changeful sort that borrows from both Eastern and Western traditions.

Only three days ago, I failed my driver’s test.

I tend to piece poems together from stray phrases and images, discovering as I proceed, Dr. Frankenstein-like, what shape the poem will take and whether it is, finally, alive.

I write mostly at night and usually after midnight. If I write during the day, then I prefer moments when I am not supposed to be writing, such as when I’m in a faculty meeting, at a seminar or on the phone.

The Fates never claims to have answers to any of these questions about death, spirituality, and fate. Instead, the questions vibrate both implicitly and explicitly around the poems’ descriptions of physical moments and spiritual explorations, like the moment of death in a hospice bed, an evening when a young girl kept watch over a dying bird, or five women holding a seance around a creaky table. The collection leaves its readers reflecting on the hand they play in their own fates, and the effect they have on the fates of others.

I get to spend my 9-5 with birds, bears, bobcats, mountain lions, creepy crawly beings and all the rooted things that sustain them. I pick through their scat and witness how they eat each other. I live near a river that’s sometimes an arroyo. Coyotes wake me up at night with freaky songs. All of that manages to create a head full of poetry.

I have been writing most of my life, which is now quite a long time. I truly think books saved me as a child, and then I began to write to make sense of the world.