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.

Because I write intuitively and image-by-image and moment-by-moment, my writing has to be powered by feelings and emotions.

With kids, they force you to get out of bed. They force you to smile. They remind you of spontaneity.

To close the empathetic gap, you really want to get the person emotionally identifying [with your subject and characters], and then when you do that, then you want sneak in a lesson about history and about politics and whatever else you might think about.

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.

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.

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