And that’s where the more surreal elements came organically out of the story itself. And then with “Playing Metal Gear Solid V,” that just came out of a joke. I was just thinking through, you know, wouldn’t it be funny if this thing happened? And then it just gets deeper and deeper as you begin exploring the idea. But you know, it’s funny, man, I’ve been thinking a lot about my relationship with the idea of magical realism

everything that I write is, on its deepest level, trying to get at something about God. And I fail a lot in that endeavor, but I think my stories that ring the most true to me or that seem the most beautiful to me are ones coming close to something regarding that truth in particular.

t’s incredibly dear to me. I shape my entire life around it. But at the same time, when I’m writing a story, I want to be very honest about the struggle that I’ve had with the religion, as well as struggles I’ve had in my relationship with Allah. And so writing that can be really difficult because I want to be honest, I want to be personal, and I want to be true to this struggle, which I think is at the heart of a lot of my characters and stories because it’s the heart of my own struggle as well.

But then I lived most of my life in suburban West Sacramento, which is a very nonviolent location. And I began to see that the peace that exists in America or in suburban neighborhoods in certain parts of America is directly tied to the violence that occurs in Afghanistan. I made that connection early on. There was a very pivotal understanding that I had from a young age that that the nonviolent isn’t actually nonviolent, like the nonviolence of America, of a police state, of this imperialist country. It’s all tied to these aggressive foreign policy maneuvers, and how they’re policing minority communities.

And so it wasn’t until I started grad school, and I was reading writers like Junot Díaz and Sandra Cisneros and these writers who weren’t afraid to draw directly from the voices of their own communities. Like the voice that they grew up with, just how people talked in the neighborhood and community. And it was beautiful. The writing was absolutely beautiful. After I read that, a light bulb went off. And I was like, oh I can write these stories in a voice that I grew up with. I don’t have to imitate Cormac McCarthy, I don’t have to imitate Faulkner, like I could write in the voice that I speak to my family with. And once I did that, that’s when the stories really took off.