So the things that I loved about the Ramona series as a child was that Ramona was complicated and messy, and she threw tantrums and she wasn’t afraid of showing her emotions. She could be angry and sad and happy and mischievous, all the things. She was a full nuanced character. And I related to the messiness of Ramona. I loved the sibling relationships, her feelings about school, all of that I could identify with very much the girl in me identified with Ramona and being a portlander and understanding what it’s like to have to play outside in the rain and then splash around in puddles in your little rain boots. But the Black girl in me was not seen. There were no Black characters in that series, and I don’t say this necessarily as a critique against Beverly Cleary, I just saw that as an invitation to write myself into the canon.
And so this idea of intersectionality and what can we bring to the page was something that as I got older and started reading House on Mango Street and saw how Sandra Cisneros was writing about home, I think both of those writers and those books were kind of in conversation in a way to help me find my story and find the types of stories that I wanted to put out into the world about the Pacific Northwest and very much about what it is like to be marginalized in a place that sometimes you feel like the center of your own story. You don’t feel like you’re on the margin at all, but you know that when you start interacting with other folks, you get the sense that, oh, everyone doesn’t see me the way I see me, or the way my family sees and loves me. And that theme comes up a lot in my work. And I think that is very much in conversation with Beverly Cleary and Sandra Cisneros and how those writers chose to write about home.