In 1985, when I was twenty-one, I taped my grandmother Rebecca telling stories. My grandmother—a vibrant, shape-shifting, endlessly creative person whose life journey brought many challenges—inspired my writing in oblique ways over the years, but it wasn’t until decades later, long after her death in 1991, that I felt ready to turn to her story.

I wrote Kantika as fiction but drew on a rich mix of oral history, family photographs and research. For the central characters (and with the permission of the people still alive), I used real names. You can watch a 5 minute video about the inspiration for Kantika and my research process. A close reader might be able to spot a few exact phrases from my recordings of my grandmother that found their way into the book!