Brenda Hillman

The techniques of contemporary poetry are probably the techniques of your daily life. I don't know a single person who goes into the grocery store and thinks in complete sentences. We often think in fragments, we think in little lists, we think in non-sequiturs, we think in feelings that may not match up with each other.

I wrote something when I was 9 that seemed pretty good for a 9 year old; it concerned flowers in our family garden - I was grateful my mother praised it. Of course, I found out later it was pretty silly, but it was the first poem I was proud of.

It is not as though the process of production holds any mystery for me, I know exactly what it involves and I know the predominant concern in shooting one of those things is production values - or as they would say, seeing it all up there on screen.

I grew up when people were afraid to 'come out' as gay. If you asked me how many gay kids I grew up with or went to school with, I would have said none - which of course could not have been true. The truth is I have no idea how many confused and frightened kids I grew up with. They are still out there.