People aren't really aware of what's happening in other places.

Write what haunts you. What keeps you up at night. What you are unable to get out of your mind. Sometimes they are the hardest things to write, but those are often the things that are worth investigating by you specifically. . .

Their Maker, she said, gives them the sky to carry because they are strong. These people do not know who they are, but if you see a lot of trouble in your life, it is because you were chosen to carry part of the sky on your head. -pg. 25

I think it's hard for an outsider to capture the flavor of a community and all its nuances, so ultimately Haitian-Americans need to start sharing intimate accounts of their stories.

I'm just melancholy by nature, and a lot of that gets into my writing.

I was neither doing these people nor myself a favor by showing up when my heart wasn't in it. There were not getting the real me, the whole me, the true me.

Even when I think of writing fiction, it's being kind of a liar, a storyteller, a weaver, and there's that sense of how much of this is your life. The story is a way you unravel your life from behind a mask.