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In poetry, I didn't have to provide resolution. I could ask hard questions without feeling responsible for the answers.

Vivek Shraya

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Vivek Shraya
Feeling
Asks
Feelings
Resolution
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Hard
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Poetry
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More quotes by Vivek Shraya

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Art can sometimes be separate from the artist.
Vivek Shraya
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As much as I believe in the capacity for art to create change, and as much as being an artist is physically and emotionally challenging, there is ultimately something a bit comfortable about making art in the comfort of your own home.
Vivek Shraya
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Children's books have great potential to reveal new possibilities to readers, because the intended audience is at an age of genuine learning.
Vivek Shraya
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I don't yet know what style will be required for my next novel, but my sense is that each book will involve a new relationship to language.
Vivek Shraya
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In my thirties, I have felt a greater urgency to make art that highlights what it feels like to be racialized, likely due to living in a country that obscures our racism with the idea of multiculturalism.
Vivek Shraya
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My art career often feels less like an art career and more like a career in educating, usually by using my body.
Vivek Shraya
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When I do book readings, I always incorporate music or singing.
Vivek Shraya
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I especially worry about the ways Canadians can be glib about our supposed difference from the US in our acceptance of diversity.
Vivek Shraya
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When I was writing, I wanted every word to be not only deliberate, but musical. Precious.
Vivek Shraya
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Of course, I can't separate my queerness from my brownness - if anything, my queerness amplifies my brownness, and vice versa - but I spent so much of my early twenties trying to erase my differences, often without awareness of what I was doing.
Vivek Shraya
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I feel like I have had to catch up to the art I've made, and learn from the protagonists I have written, especially in relation to gender.
Vivek Shraya
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I do use art as a site of protest, particularly in relation to dominant narratives.
Vivek Shraya
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I always work with text orally in the writing process, saying passages aloud to measure flow.
Vivek Shraya
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As a brown artist, I have mixed feelings about my relationship to art and my responsibilities post-Trump.
Vivek Shraya
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Should I be collaborating with artists of color solely because of their race and my politics? This question is weighted with my own worry that I have been invited to speak or collaborate solely because of my race, and not because of my abilities.
Vivek Shraya
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I didn't want to give the white reader an opportunity to think of racism as imaginary - a sentiment that is already a central barrier in addressing the problem.
Vivek Shraya
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When I wouldn't leave home without my blue contacts or when I was bleaching my hair, I didn't have the language to articulate that I was trying to assimilate to whiteness. If anything, I was trying to look normal.
Vivek Shraya
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Now is not the time for Canadians to be sanctimonious. It is time for us to be prudent and active.
Vivek Shraya
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Children are receptive to talking about gender creativity, confirming the importance of the book as a means to instigate this dialogue at an early age.
Vivek Shraya
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If anything, I have witnessed the ways my art travels, or is rendered more accessible, when sanctioned by or connected to white artists.
Vivek Shraya