Explicitly candid about healing the inner child through writing, Mark and I comb through these processes and revisit their journeys of how their many novels have been shaped by experience.

Mark Oshiro is a #1 NY Times Bestselling Author of The Sun and the Star: A Nico Di Angelo Adventure, and award winning novelist of YA and middle grade books Such as: Anger is a Gift, Into the Light, Each of us a Desert, and many more.

Specifically, we recall the process and life experiences that infused these two novels in particular: Into the Light, and Anger is a Gift.

Having spent time talking to students in Oakland about their experiences in the school system, Mark wrote Anger is a Gift as a way of doing justice to telling their stories authentically, whilst infusing some of their own personal connection to the world through certain characters in the story.

Into the Light became a much more fiction/biographical story, once Mark became ready to truly share the depths of their own life experiences as a person who grew up in the foster care system, and had experience with strictly religious people who swore against queerness.

All of this has led to many of these stories being written, and now, Mark and I get to comb through it all. Reading Mark’s work in summer of 2023, I knew that one day I would want to talk to this person about their art, especially as a queer writer myself who makes it a point to face my experiences through my writing.

I hope there’s something in here for you.