We're writers. What do we do? We tell stories. We make up stories. We create art.

Maybe innocence is a skin you must shed to build layers more resistant to the caustic truths of the world.

I'm, by nature, a really optimistic person. It goes back to my parents having been each divorced three times and my finding some way to survive all that. I always managed to survive by being upbeat.

I write, fighting for every sentence, fighting to hold the reader with every paragraph.

Undocumented people have been targeted for years now. Even under the Obama administration, there was a really large number of deportations of undocumented people. Trump has just taken that policy and ratcheted it up several notches. He's made it much more intense. We've had situations where people who would have been covered by the Obama administration, people who had been promised a path toward legal residency, had that taken away. I did not imagine that. I could never have imagined that happening.

There's a lot of really wonderful things about the United States of America, especially its ethnic diversity and its mostly successful struggle to create a democracy out of many different cultures. So, we have a lot of capital as a people, we have a lot of cultural capital to keep our democracy going.

We're writers. What do we do? We tell stories. We make up stories. We create art.