At the age of seventeen, I left school. I went to university, and I wrote my first attempts at poetry in a room in a flat at the edge of the city.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I was a 16-year-old girl at one point, so of course I wrote poetry.
I wrote things for the school's newspaper, and - like all teenagers - I dabbled in poetry.
I was completely devoted to reading and books from the age of seven. It took until I was 18 to have the confidence to write poetry.
Poetry was the first step, and from the age of 18, there was nothing else I wanted to do.
I grew up in New York City. In elementary school, I was a charter member of the Scribble Scrabble Club, and in high school, my poems were published in an anthology of student poetry.
I actually started out as a poet in high school. I published in small literary magazines for probably about ten years. I entered the Yale Younger Poet contest every year, until I was too old to be a younger poet, and I never got more than a form rejection letter from them.
I've been writing poems and stories since I was about 13.
In my late teenage years, I developed a real passion for it, and wrote a lot of poetry.
I took my first creative writing class when I was 24, then went onto to get a graduate degree in poetry. I've sort of never looked back from there.
I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.