I'm often asked what are my advice for writers Young Writers and I think when I was a younger writer starting out in my 20s I loved rules I want to know all the rules because the rules are like the the guard rails on the highway you you feel very comforted driving knowing that you know you have to go straight and you turn according to what the municipal planners have given you but if you follow the guardrail and the road you will only go to what is known on the GPS you will only go to places that have already been discovered and and explored ahead of you in other words you're following rather than truly going and endeavoring and I think for so many queer folks after a while you realize that this road was never made with me in mind and I have to stop the car get out of it and climb over this guard rail and now I'm wandering far away from everything that I've known far away from anything that has has a name or a sign or a road signal and I'm in the middle of the forest or the meadow and I'm terrified I'm washed with confusion and fear and there's almost this electric uh ecstatic Terror that comes over me because I'm truly lost um but I'm also perhaps the most free I've ever been and everything I feel every step I take is something new to me it is a discovery and from here I have to make a life and I think that to me is is queerness it's just finding the courage or having no choice but to get off the road and explore and I think that's where I am now as a practitioner in in my work I don't know all the rules that I learned have been disproven either by others or by my own work and I realized that I don't really know what I'm doing I'm just following the Curiosity that the work of the writer is to not so much much nailed anything down but to make space for the Endeavor of curiosity to widen the theater of wonder um and that to me is a very queer thing but it doesn't it's not something that is just available to queer people it's had you know heteronormativity could be abandoned if you have the courage to do so