As part of media publicity for my creative non-fiction chapbook A Study in Our Selves, I answered questions with QLRS about my favorite word, my writing pet peeves, and other things writers geek out about.

Here is a short excerpt:

As someone who moves across geographic, ethnic, gender and national boundaries, how has your self-identification influenced your writing? Are there pitfalls you try to avoid in your works? 

The more I write about my identities, the more I realize how language fundamentally fails to encapsulate them. When I, for example, tell people I’m Thai, what they imagine to be a Thai person will fundamentally be different from the Thai identity I have internalized. Every label can only be an approximation. Knowing this fact frees me from having to conform to others’ expectations of what kind of person I should be, and instead allows me to write into existence who I am. I am always in the process of self-definition. Especially when I write from the first-person, the words I use to identify myself doesn’t really matter. What matters is how the literary persona sees, parses, and interprets the world for the reader, which will happen subjectively based on their personal history. That emphasis on the personal perspective, I think, is the true wisdom behind the writing of creative nonfiction, and why I have found my abode in this genre.