I started writing when I was six. My mom left to work abroad, and she sent me a poem in one of her first letters. I remember writing a silly verse in response, something like "one plus one equals two, i love you" and she encouraged me to keep on. That's when writing took a hold of me, methinks, and I haven't stopped since.
I write to be present in the world. To capture what is happening around us and to make a stand. If I can offer, as author and artist Roberta Allen described, "small containers for change," it will be worth many moments of intense agony—and not just in birthing stories.
Ernest Hemingway, Wislawa Szymborska, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Chinua Achebe, Milan Kundera, Jhumpa Lahiri, John Irving, Audrey Niffenegger, Vanessa Gebbie, etc.
Lots of books I love. Among them: 100 Years of Solitude, The Old Man and the Sea, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and many more.
