I was a nerdy kid and I was writing and showing other fellows who are still my friends what I was writing. We were sharing that and kept sharing it. The experiences they had were so different than mine.

The stories on standardized tests don't have one author, therefore they can never authentically be in the first person. Imagine that! Everywhere, there are these tests that have been written by multiple people.

I was a nerdy kid and I was writing and showing other fellows who are still my friends what I was writing. We were sharing that and kept sharing it. The experiences they had were so different than mine.

Every story, every poem, every written piece is about belonging. There is a me, there is a we, there is an us, and we want to belong to it or we don't want to belong. You can read every story with this as its main focus.

I've been writing most of my life; it's just something I do.

The ways in which a standardized language test induces storytelling, for example, is the opposite of creative writing; you have to learn a logical way to start a story, whereas in creative writing you may begin at the end or begin at the middle of the story.

You can say that literature is about topics like love, death, and all that, but I think there is only one topic that applies to all literature and that is belonging.