SOURCE: Doty, Mark, and Michael Giltz. “This Boy's Life.” Advocate (12 October 1999): 78-9.

In the following interview, Doty discusses the success of Heaven's Coast and the recollections of his formative years recorded in Firebird.

When poet Mark Doty was a little boy, he sneaked into his sister's room to play model. “I put the glass on top of my head, pulling myself up straight, the glass wobbles, I lift my arms up for balance, that's better, I'm getting it now,” Doty writes in his slyly comic memoir Firebird, out this month from HarperCollins. “Another wobble, so I try moving my head from side to side like a Balinese dancer, and that's it, slip and disaster, the glass crashes to the floor and shatters, unnaturally loud.”

The aftermath of that little accident spells out the dynamics of his family: a scary father, an eccentric mother who's drinking more and more...