As a person of color, I know race can't be stripped from admiration or preference.

Of course, I can't separate my queerness from my brownness - if anything, my queerness amplifies my brownness, and vice versa - but I spent so much of my early twenties trying to erase my differences, often without awareness of what I was doing.

Now is not the time for Canadians to be sanctimonious. It is time for us to be prudent and active.

Making music has been connected to one of my greatest heartaches, because my own music has never quite connected with audiences. But it was this heartache that pushed me to explore other artistic avenues, like writing and filmmaking, and I ultimately feel most at home in a multidisciplinary environment.

Writing about racism requires a directness that writing a love story does not.

I have been and continue to be committed to art as a tool to ignite, comfort, and discomfort.

In poetry, I didn't have to provide resolution. I could ask hard questions without feeling responsible for the answers.