SOURCE: Doty, Mark, and Jonathan Bing. “Mark Doty: The Idea of Order on Cape Cod.” Publishers Weekly 243, no. 16 (15 April 1996): 44-5.

In the following interview, Doty discusses his literary career and life upon the publication of Heaven's Coast.

Some weeks after the death of Wally Roberts, his partner of 12 years, the poet Mark Doty found himself wandering ruefully through Beacon Hill, the Boston neighborhood where he and Wally first lived together more than a decade earlier. Revisiting his old, moldering, rent-controlled brownstone, once home to numerous friends, Doty found it empty of all but two of the original tenants. “Where had they all gone?” he mused. “Disappeared, moved away, and mostly, of course, died; this was a house full of gay men, in 1981, and now it's a house full of no one.”

That encounter forms one of several lambent, haunting set pieces from Doty's new memoir, Heaven's Coast, marking...