Much of the visualizing is imaginative.

My grandfather is Portuguese. He betrayed what was expected of him and married my grandmother of African descent on my father's side.

Eliot said that "genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood." What he meant by that is, the emotional understanding comes before you understand the argument that follows later in the text.

Whenever I went to an historical moment that was sad or where something terrible happened, it was, for me, a learning moment, a teaching moment for those who survived.

People who are suffering have to visualize ways out of tragedy to actually get out of it.

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.

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?