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

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.

I am someone who is fascinated with European German history, the Holocaust, and to see these parallels in our own democratic system, and then to see them come to this absolutely incredible climax, and this fruition with the election of The Donald, it was just too much.

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

In real life, there are right-wingers, there are anti-immigrant activists who want to overturn this constitutional right that we have to become Americans when we're born in this country. There's lots of people who believe that this has led to the phenomenon of the anchor babies. I am an anchor baby. My parents were able to receive their residency and citizenship because, I, a U.S. citizen child of theirs, was born in Los Angeles.

What we're trying to do as writers is rescue, preserve this space of thoughtfulness of language, of a deeper and more honest appreciation of our reality. And, so, we have to work even harder as writers against this tide of silliness, against this tide of superficiality, against this horrible Greek chorus on Twitter where everyone is insulting each other and now we have an insulter-in-chief, who's risen to the presidency by insulting people.

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.