I was on the wrong side of colonization. My ancestry is mostly mired in having the colonial experience as colonized subjects, first as slaves and then as independent subjects with a post-colonial experience.

I can't stay engaged for years with a book unless it has feelings. It can't be an idea for me - it has to be a felt thing.

I usually feel something before I know it.

I found it instructive and highly constructive as a writer to go to a point of disaster and come out with a feel for it and then some sort of a lesson based on feeling.

Magical realism as a declaration in the text is usually when someone can't speak and then they must be magically reinvigorated in some way.

If you die without agency as a child, but you have agency in your body [in the novel], how is it to be enacted unless it is being reimagined by a writer?

When you walk to the end of a fiction, its procedure is 1) intuitive; and 2) emotional. Its intelligence is emotional, I think.