Somebody once asked me how I define sobriety, and my response was 'liberation from dependence.'
Shame doesn't exist as an emotion without the projected or perceived sense of judgment coming from somewhere else.
It's one of the most liberating things I experience in writing - letting yourself get rid of a gesture or character or plot point that always nagged, even if you couldn't admit to yourself that it did.
The 'here' of Watts is pastel houses with window gratings in curly patterns. 'Here' is yard sales with bins full of stuffed animals and used water guns. Here is Crips turf.
Armchair poverty tourism has been around as long as authors have written about class. As an author, I have struggled myself with the nuances of writing about poverty without reducing any community to a catalog of its difficulties.
Probably every person is some mixture of wanting to feel a sense of commonality and shared experience with others but also wanting to feel completely singular and unique.
The publishing industry, unsurprisingly, is full of different people who love different things and express that love in different languages. Find the people, the editors and agents, with whom you share some language, and some sense of what makes literature worth reading.
If you operate under the premise that everybody already has some experiences that could be sources of empathy for them, I wonder if there's some process of coaxing people into tapping into that knowledge.
The story of getting better can be just as compelling as the story of falling apart.
'Tough' is one of the last adjectives I would use to describe myself.
You pass the old L.A. County jail, which is surprisingly beautiful. It's got a handsome stone facade and stately columns. The new L.A. County jail - called The Twin Towers - isn't beautiful at all; it's a stucco panopticon the color of sick flesh.
Redeeming subjects from cliche is its own pleasure and privilege.
I've been lucky enough to work with extraordinary teachers along the way, and I'm excited to share what I've learned with graduate students at SNHU. I'm just as excited for what I'll learn from them.
Whenever I've been stuck on a project, it's always brought me solace to the return to books that moved me in the past. It's a nice way to get outside my own head; and it brings me back to one of the most important reasons I write at all: to bring some pleasure to readers, to make them think or feel.
After finishing a draft, no matter how rough, I almost always put it aside for a while. It doesn't matter if it's a story or a novel, I find that when it's still fresh in my mind I'm either thoroughly sick of its flaws or completely blind to them. Either way, I'm unable to make substantive edits of any value.
The global phenomenon of poverty tourism - or 'poorism' - has become increasingly popular during the past few years. Tourists pay to be guided through the favelas of Brazil and the shantytowns of South Africa. The recently opened Los Angeles Gang Tour carries visitors through battle-scarred territories of urban violence and deprivation.
Though there might not be any easy answers to the problem of poverty, its most compelling scribes do not resign themselves to representation solely for the sake of those age-old verities of truth and beauty.
I can't remember a time when I wasn't trying to figure out what to say at the dinner table.
It's kind of funny that I've been branded as the empathy lady when, really, what I'm doing is questioning and interrogating empathy.
I had never really thought of myself as a baby person, but it's just a really profound connection.
