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THREAD: I can’t stress this enough. Do you know how frustrating it was in my MFA when my professors would ask me to write about my inner city upbringing...when all I wanted to do was write detective stories, or stories about fairies, trolls, werewolves, and ghosts? https://twitter.com/claribel_ortega/status/1273793824217796609
I want to write, stories. I don't want to feel pressured to give my readers a socio-economic history or political lesson. I should be able to write what I want, whether that be romance, or crime fiction, or non-fiction, without feeling the pressure to write about inequality.
There are other writers who do that, and do it more eloquently and sophisticated than I can ever. Our history and socio-economic-and political experiences are important, widely important. Look around what we are living, but writers of color should not have to feel pressured
to only write about the immigrant experience, or the inner city experience, etc. We should be allowed to write whatever it is we want to write, any genre, any story.
While I have written stories about my family and being Puerto Rican, I like to think that those are more fantastical, and specific to my family and our experience, but I should not be held to only write those stories. I have written stories that have nothing to do with being PR.
