You’ve drawn a vivid picture of Ginger East.
I based it a little bit on the neighbourhood I grew up in, in Mississauga. I mean it’s like a 50-50 split. Half is fictional, but in my mind the layout of the neighbourhood is pretty similar. It was not primarily an immigrant neighbourhood, but there were a lot of new immigrants there and kids of immigrants like me.
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Did you always want to write?
From the time that I was very young, I wanted to write fiction. People always said to me, “Maybe you should do something more lucrative, be a journalist, an editor.” And so I went to York, did a degree in professional writing. I was hyper-focused on this idea of what a writer should be, that they needed to be older, more mature. This is a bit of an aside, but it seems like now, in the young-adult space, there are so many writers who are getting published young, getting all these accolades, it’s so inspiring.