Once I became historically aware, I realized there are these formative moments of history tied around tragedy and disaster and sacrifice, that led people to survive and take stock and move on with some kind of notion of betterment.

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.

I'm interested in someone who's mired in grief: how do you get back to that thing that makes them warm? Because you know that's in there.

Much of the visualizing is imaginative.

If you created a place in air where they're breathing and running around in, and then they speak in that fictional milieu, it's perfectly authenticated because the whole world relies on you, who've made it possible.

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