There’s a lot of our voices moving in and out of one another, a lot of the desperation and resentment and defensiveness of teenage girlhood, a lot of that young anger at the mother for being a woman in a world that hates women (the horror!)
We basically wanted President Ono to say that he acknowledged that this was a murder, a hurtful thing. The University kept referring to it as “the incident.”
I want poetry to till and tilt. I want it to renew and restage difficult questions from unexpected perspectives.
There are writers who can really unravel a sweater with slow deliberate style, but, if anything, I must underwrite. I’m always trying to get out of explaining or defining anything.
The biggest impact on my method was how I’ve seen writers back themselves into a corner or become exasperated with various dead ends and move beyond that to completion and artistic excitement.
A first-person narrator is allowed to be unreliable. The voice is like a dirty windshield at night in the rain. Even if all you see is glare and blobs, you assume whatever’s out there is real. But the second an omniscient narrator makes a continuity mistake, readers want to kick its ass.
Ultimately I am interested in Caribbean writing for itself, on its own terms. I am interested in it because it is interesting.
My book considers these fairly elite, mainstream conversations about China and America’s shared future. But it’s also about the construction of authority, the spirit of competition that underlies all intellectual endeavor.
What happens if you’re not religious, but religion’s still the lens through which you see the world?
This needs more subjectivity and observation. Tell me more about being nervous.