Interviews

“There’s a research element to many of my books, not just reading or looking into the archives, in the vein of investigative poetics, but also sensory investigation. Lately, I’ve been calling the books “ancestral encounters.” That seems to cover a…

“I feel more despair now than I did ten years ago; the global uncertainty, mostly. But part of being an artist is to say, “I don’t know what’s going to happen.” To me, that’s the truth of everything. People ask,…

“It’s only publishing that loves these silos and categories, because maybe it makes it easier for algorithms to streamline for sales. But I think it’s due time that we in literature embraced cultural and artistic multiplicity. The multi-narrative is the…

“The point of books like mine and the wider canon is to help people take action. Action comes after one has had the idea powerfully illuminate a situation that is no longer sustainable. My book speaks to the deep psyche…

I think part of the work of going to the border to do that project was not only to bear witness to what was going on there, but also to revisit a place that I myself crossed as a child.…

“Painting also just brings me a lot of joy. I find a lot of joy in applying colors to the canvas. You need that when you’re writing a book. The two art forms feed off each other. My writing, and…

“The characters in this book often serve as stand-ins for my family members. I forgave Kamron, and that helped me forgive my father. Or maybe it was the other way around–maybe in the writing process I forgave my father and…

“I wanted to create an honest depiction of the world as I knew it growing up. I needed to be honest in how the food smelled, in how the music playing vibrated everything around it, in how the specific rhythm…

“At any rate, we have to find a way to infuse empathy into these AI models. And that’s where we come to my novel. I don’t know if I was thinking of this in writing the novel—I was slogging through…

“I wasn’t concerned with making every character lovable. Narcissists are not lovable from their victims’ POV. This book offers a look at how to survive narcissistic parents, not how to love them.”

“By expanding beyond her story, I was able to broaden the scope and incorporate the experiences of other young women whose stories I encountered during my research. And finally: by creating a fictional world, I could give my protagonist experiences…