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.

At bottom, I'm a cheerful person.

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

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

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.

Much of the visualizing is imaginative.

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.