I had an idea for a story about a young woman who was living with people who were different, not just superficially different - such as hair colour, or eye colour, or skin colour - but different in some significant way.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I'm intrigued by the way in which physical appearance can often direct a person's life; things happen differently for a beautiful woman than for a plain one.
I grew up in a small town where everyone wanted to be the same or look the same and was afraid to be different.
A woman has many faces as she goes through her life. It's like we need more than one hair-do. We have many, many changes in the evolution of our lives. We have, we learn, and we grow; we view life differently, and life views us differently.
If there's any message to my work, it is ultimately that it's OK to be different, that it's good to be different, that we should question ourselves before we pass judgment on someone who looks different, behaves different, talks different, is a different color.
I am interested in people living in the margins of society, and I do have a mission to tell the stories of women of colour in particular. I feel we've been present throughout history, but our voices have been neglected.
My mother was in the kind of late-'60s, early-'70s origins of female emancipation. And she was very much like, 'You're not going to be defined by how you look. It's going to be about who you are and what you do.'
People, unprotected by their roles, become isolated in beauty and intellect and illness and confusion.
It's really important to share the idea that being different might feel like a problem at the time, but ultimately diversity is a strength.
My stories deal with multicultural situations as well as multigenerational settings.
I was a child who went about in a world of colors... My friends, my companions, became women slowly; I became old in instants.