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.

At bottom, I'm a cheerful person.

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 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.

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

I think poetry can lead to policy, and I can hear the laughter when I say that.