“By understanding my writing as music and not thought, as body and not brain, it helps me drop into a larger creative vibration.”

“I am always stuck between writing the beautiful thing and writing the hard ugly thing, and I am enjoying being in this spot of not having to figure it out.”

“I love seeing writing as a pursuit of obsession, writing deeper and deeper into obsessions until I find a way out, a way to new insight.”

“A question I’ve been asking myself in recent years, and that my work is definitely now asking of my reader, is about the extent to which we are willing to privatize vs publicize different emotions, particularly love and grief.”

“If my ability to reinvest myself in a piece is the roadblock to completion, then perhaps my motivation to write lies elsewhere, and it’s vital to prioritize and chase that impulse.”

“To understand how one’s stories and one’s interiority are rooted in the somatic has been key to my process as a writer.”

“I ask myself how far I can push my writing, in terms of both content and craft, and I ask my readers how far they can allow themselves to be pushed by my writing.”

“Where would I be as a writer and person in this world, if not for the stories I have read and loved?”

“I can’t predict what will happen tomorrow or the next five years, but I want to keep shifting and evolving as I continue to write and learn and explore who I am, who I can be, and where I belong in this world.”

“We’re all trying to get at the same ugliness and truth, ultimately, though we take different routes through our writing to get there.”

“The only real heavy lifting I ask of my readers is to consider the question: What bigger truth(s) is this piece of writing excavating for you?”

“A question my work is asking of the reader is do you want to be healed and how? How do you heal? Who do you walk alongside when you walk with your community?”

“Diasporic writers must use our privilege for good, especially the privileges we did not ask for but are nonetheless afforded by the nature of being in diaspora in the West.”

“More than ever before, except for maybe when I was a kid, I allow myself to get to the blank page with excitement, hope, ambition, but not that much expectation or pressure.”

“Writing was something that i held tight and as free of institutional compressions and extraction as i could, but in that grip, it wasn’t growing.”