First off what's the status of your current poetic endeavors?

I'm working on a manuscript titled Angelic Enough. I don't plan to submit it for about a year yet, so will be taking some time this year to write more and revise.

As a writer from a Mennonite tradition who no longer in a Mennonite context (geographically or religiously), how much distance would you say is necessary to honestly reflect on the tradition you were raised in? Can good writing come from someone who, say, hasn't experienced a significantly traumatic event or two in his/her background?

People make a great deal of the need for "distance" -- both in terms of time and space, as if one needs to be far away from a thing in order to write about it, as if intimacy were dangerous and distorting. I am suspicious of this advice--although I understand why it is often given to writers. And honestly, I don't feel distanced from my Mennonite background; I'm the kind of person who drags it all with me, and sometimes it seems pretty noisy in my mind.

Good writing comes from life and imagination and hard work and luck.

In Eve's Striptease, you reveal a complex and paradoxical view toward your own body. Do you think the questioning of bodily/sexual action that is apparent in several of the poems is a direct result of your Mennonite upbringing?

It's American and Protest to regard the body as "bad," and beyond that, it's part of the Western world and Plato to regard the female body--materiality and maternity--as dangerous. So, no, I wouldn't say that idea is the consequence of only a Mennonite upbringing.

I love the material world, and I love rendering the material world through language, which of course makes it immaterial.