If you've been in a symbolic struggle long enough, even when the struggle is over, you don't know it's over. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
"I want to be always happy," Maxine Hong Kingston announces . But, as this interview makes clear, for me, it was the… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
If I could write a novel while I'm walking, I probably would. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
These commonplace categories - wife, mother, housewife, teacher - are in fact teleological referents. They gesture to profound states of being that… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
If the act of writing is the act of putting aside the masculine, then you might in that way, it may sound… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
Wouldn't that be wonderful if I could do that? And that way, I could walk with the muse, rather than walk without… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
It's as if I'm setting aside the husband and son, you know, the patriarchal world, for the world of the muse. This… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
I also wanted to be like my brothers, physically, and yet not physically. So I would constantly - and I think nowadays… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
When you're a female poet, would you, therefore, invoke a male muse? When nuns get consecrated into their vocations, they become brides… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
Is there a term that one might use rather than say that one is homosexual? Is there a different physical gender and… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
Now that I'm more middle class, I have access to consumer goods. I do enjoy feminine frippery, feminine doo-da, stuff like that. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
The poem might come to you as you're preparing to teach a lecture, right? And when you say, "no" to that occasion, that poem… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
Once you stop talking about the female body empowering itself vis-à-vis male forays or invasions or male demands or the necessity to respond to… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
I have a muse who's very powerful, but I'm still a hopeless deadbeat of a poet. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
Free verse is chained in sentence-to-sentence links and breaks free in line breaks. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
I feel compassionate, because I know [students] all have to go down this road of suffering and it's going to be tough. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
Even after the mothering dropped because my son grew up, the writing - the muse - was always the third wheel, the lowest on… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
If you've been in a symbolic struggle long enough, even when the struggle is over, you don't know it's over. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
"I want to be always happy," Maxine Hong Kingston announces . But, as this interview makes clear, for me, it was the desire to… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
I'm in my 60s, and a cancer scare just makes you more aware of mortality. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
Crows appear in many of my new unpublished poems. In these walks, they take on a symbolic life apart from their irritating, undeniable, interruptive… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image
People called me a tomboy. That was the term used then. I was very much someone who was comfortable in male clothing, and even… — Shirley Geok-lin Lim Copy Share Image