“I’d be in a restaurant and someone would be looking at my copy I wear around my neck and they’d say, “What is it?” And I’d say, “Oh, it’s a copy of Nina Simone’s chewing gum.” And they would visibly well up in tears.”

“Things had gotten very loud around me. I heard everybody else’s voice, and I couldn’t hear my own.”

“My father had asked me to not tell anyone. Especially my mother.”

“Even though this is all true, you can still take a tone, you can still find an angle. It doesn’t have to be like, this is all coming straight from the center of my heart.”

“What I knew for sure — and this comes with age, with being the Black mother of a Black son— I knew that my experience was the truth! Because I was the only one having it!”

“Hopelessness can be the comedown on the other side of a moment of liberation where you thought everything was going to change, and you feel as if not enough did. “

“You try to write your future novels, and that might be the hardest target to hit because the future is just coming at us so quickly.”

“It just feels like the whole system here when it comes to who gets to write what about whom is broken, and we’re not asking the right questions to fix it.”

““I was fairly clear on the fact that I was never going to make money off my writing… The upside of that was that my writing was all play, for me.”

“I thought: This is the kind of life I want. I want adventures. I want the super blue sky. I want to feel free.”

“I didn’t know such a thing existed, and here I am in it. Although at that time I didn’t see it that way; I just simply walked around every day exploding, just exploding, with everything I was seeing and experiencing.”

“How do I live with this complexity? And with the reality that there are some things that I might never know?”

“The problem was we couldn’t talk about the ways in which our anger was actually deeply interrelated and in sympathy in certain ways. And why would that be?”

“That’s my instinct— to not finish a project. I’ll start it with high hopes and lots of ideas and then if I don’t have velocity on my side, I myself undergo too many changes.”

“Even the most skeptical writers talk about process by using language like “the hours just flew by,” or “such and such phrase just came to me.” They’ll mine the language of the supernatural to talk about what’s happening.”

“I’m never going to feel confident that I’m making the right choice or that I’m the right person to tell a story or that I’m not going to make a complete fool of myself. You just have to work in spite of that.”

“My poems arrive at these moments and because they arrive at these moments I realize I have to live like the poems. I want to live like the work I’m making.”

“The text is the most successful embodiment. That is where I have succeeded. That text could not have happened if I didn’t go on this search, and if I wasn’t present in all that vulnerability.”

“I decided I wanted to teach a class on Asian American fiction. I did not have the typical experience of my parents being immigrants, or their parents being immigrants. But I thought, well why can’t I teach this? As an adoptee, this is part of the Asian American experience.”

My house had never been cleaner. I was like “I’m going to weedwack!” I’ve never weedwacked anything in my life.