Artistic Statement—my creative philosophy

The thing I keep coming back to is memory—how it lives in a body, in a room, in the way a woman folds a piece of fabric the same way her grandmother did without ever being taught. I'm not interested in plot the way I'm interested in that. The residue. What stays.

I write about women, mostly. Women who carry things. Migration, silence, the kind of resistance that doesn't look like resistance until you've sat with it long enough—a woman who keeps something hidden, a woman who refuses to forget. I'm drawn to the quiet ones, the ones history forgot to write down, because I think that's where the real story is. Not the loud version. The version nobody recorded.

Character, for me, starts with contradiction. I don't trust a character who knows exactly what she wants. People are messier than that—we want two opposite things at once, we lie to ourselves, we love people who hurt us. So when I'm building someone, I look for the fracture line first. The place where she doesn't add up. That's usually where she becomes real.

My process is kind of a mess, and I've made peace with that. I write in fragments. Scenes out of order. A line I overheard, an image that won't leave me alone, a room I can see clearly before I know who's standing in it. I follow the feeling and trust the shape will show up later. Houses keep appearing—rooms, thresholds, things buried in walls. I think I'm always asking the same question in different rooms: what does a place remember when the people are gone?

And I act, too, which changes how I write. I write knowing a body has to hold these words, that someone has to breathe between the lines. So I leave space. I trust the silence to do some of the work.