Many Stories Matter. Stories Have Been Used

Many Stories Matter. Stories Have Been Used To Dispossess And To Malign. But Stories Can Also Be Used To Empower, And To Humanize. Stories Can Break The Dignity Of A People. But Stories Can Also Repair That Broken Dignity.

The Problem With Gender Is That It Prescribes How We Should Be Rather Than Recognizing How We Are. Imagine How Much Happier We Would Be, How Much Freer To Be Our True Individual Selves, If We Didn't Have The Weight Of Gender Expectations.

I Can Write With Authority Only About What I Know Well, Which Means That I End Up Using Surface Details Of My Own Life In My Fiction.

Papa Sat Down At The Table And Poured His Tea From The China Tea Set With Pink Flowers On The Edges. I Waited For Him To Ask Jaja And Me To Take A Sip, As He Always Did. A Love Sip, He Called It, Because You Shared The Little Things You Loved With The People You Love.

My Grandfather Died In The War, My Family Went Through The War, And It Affected My Parents In Really Profound Ways. I've Always Wanted To Write About That Period - In Some Ways To Digest It For Myself, Something That Defined Me But That I Didn't Go Through.