You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed, or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi, this is Michael Silverblad, and welcome to Bookworm.

My guest today is Eileen Miles, the author of Chelsea Girls, recently published by Black

Sparrow.

I've known her work as a poet.

This is her first book of short stories, and it follows several books of poetry, most

recently, Not Me, Sappho's Boat, A Fresh Young Voice

from the Plains. Well, I know that for years you were resistant to prose writing. What made

you try it? Well, you know, I was, what do you mean resistant?

Well, I remember talking to you over 10 years ago, and I was saying that I thought that poets had to be,

that poets were being discovered because of prose works now, and you were very distinct about what you wanted to be.

Right, right, right. Yeah. Yeah, well, I mean, I guess I still am a poet, but I'm a poet. I'm a long-line poet.

I mean, I guess I think there was just a moment at the beginning of the 80s where it seemed like, you know, the way people thought was changing

and that there was more of a sense of wanting to have a career as a writer, and that if you wanted

to have a career as a writer, you just kind of put your poet ways behind you. And I think I just,

I just didn't want to do that. And I guess I feel like I haven't. I mean, I think I have been,

I actually have been writing prose since 1980.

And the form of it's changed, and I think I've gotten to be a more sophisticated prose writer, in fact, because I think the earlier things in this book are very raw and just like a step up from, you know, the sort of like documentary poetry kind of. They're a little bit like

journal entries because I was kind of teaching myself how to write prose and just thinking

that the size of the room I was in as a writer now was bigger and just to see how that felt,

...