I don't know what issues concerning identity have helped contemporary fiction evolve to what it is now. All I know is that the range of voices that are being heard and published is a lot more diverse than when I was coming up.
From Jessica Hagedorn
I love writing dialogue, and I think a lot of my writing is visual and very cinematic.
I think for a lot of so-called post-colonial peoples, there's a feeling of not being quite legitimate, of not being pure enough.
I'm an underdog person, so I align myself with those who seem to be not considered valuable in polite society.
I'm preparing for a multimedia theater piece, Airport Music, that's coming up in New York City.
My identity is linked to my grandmother, who's pure Filipino, as pure as you can probably get. And that shaped my imagination. So that's how I identify.
There are certain regions in the country where the indigenous people eat dogs.
There were also horror shows on the radio. Very terrifying and thrilling to me as a kid. They had all these creepy sound effects. They would come on at ten o'clock at night, and I just would scare myself to death.
We didn't have television until I was about eight years old, so it was either the movies or radio. A lot of radio drama. That was our television, you know. We had to use our imagination. So it was really those two things, and the comics, that I immersed myself in as a child.
Growing up in the Philippines, I loved all kinds of movies. We had a very healthy film industry there when I was a child.
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1 perspectives