When you think back to the earliest version of yourself as a maker, what moment or memory surfaces first?

Dressing up and putting on plays for the grownups as a little kid, making movies with my cousins and my brother in my grandparents’ backyard. I would write them and direct them and make everyone flashcards with their dialogue so they could memorize their lines, but they were all boys, so all they wanted to do was the fight scenes. And first grade, the first time I set foot on a stage, in an all-Black, theater in the round AND dinner theater staging of Hello Dolly at Shepherd Elementary School in DC, I just fell in love.

What’s a small detail from your upbringing that lives quietly inside your work now?

Every Friday night we would do Family Movie Night, and we would go to Video Americain and rent an old movie, lots of musicals and old black and white movies, and we would get burgers from across the street, then we’d go home and watch a movie as a family, and it was my favorite thing. When I think of that moment in Newbies when Kai stops and turns around on the street, and that look in her eye when she looks up, it really feels like a moment out of an old movie.

What feelings tend to start your creative process — curiosity, tension, nostalgia, something else entirely?

Definitely tension. When I’m feeling angsty about something, and I gotta write through it to figure it out and try to make sense of it, or at least to have that emotional catharsis of getting it outside of me and turning it into something. And the angst flows into the story: all my characters are aching, longing, navigating impossible love.

What does peace look or feel like for you when you’re deep in your practice?

Maybe more like a rush, like a creative high, like you’re in the groove and you’re on a roll and it’s just flowing. It’s the greatest feeling. And then, on set, when you’re watching the actor do something you never imagined on the page, and you’re just overcome because they’ve taken this thing you created, and they’ve made it more than you ever could’ve envisioned on your own. I’ll cry on set when that happens.

When an idea first appears, what happens between that spark and the moment you turn it into something tangible?

Years. And a lot of feeling like you’re almost going to give up, but knowing you never will. So much time alone with it, so much work that will never “show up” in the final thing, but still shows in it.

Do you have a personal ritual that helps you cross that bridge from thought to creation?

megz and I have started doing retreats, just going somewhere and having focused time and space to “lock in” and write. And honestly, they’re the best. You get so much writing done, and time kind of expands, like the days feel longer in a good way. It’s nice to get away from the world and from real life and just immerse yourself in the world of the thing you’re creating.

What’s the most surprising place or moment where a fully formed idea has arrived for you?

Maybe not surprising, and maybe not fully formed, but walks always shake loose the best ideas for me. Honestly feel like we’ve written most of this film we’re working on while walking. Which reminds me of something my mom said about how writing isn’t just sitting down and physically writing. It’s all the thinking about the thing you do while you’re doing everything else in life. In this case, writing is also walking.

Is there a tactile experience you rely on to reconnect with yourself when your creative world feels loud?

Reading before bed. Holding a book, turning the pages. Not wanting it to end cuz you like it so much and you don’t want to say goodbye to these characters, to this story. Reading books where the writing is so good it makes you want to write, makes you want to write better.

What does “holding your work in your hands” mean for you — literally or figuratively?

I hold it all the time. It goes everywhere with me. It’s always there. In the shower, in the car, on a walk, while cooking dinner, while watching other stuff, in bed before I fall asleep, in my dreams while I’m sleeping, when I wake up in the morning. megz and I literally talk about it all day long. It’s like a baby. You can’t not hold it. And you want to hold it. And even when you’re away from it, it’s still with you, it’s still on your mind. It’s always. Til it is.

What does printed media — as a format — give you that digital spaces can’t?

I was that kid who always had her head in a book. When I got in trouble, my parents would take my books away and put them “on embargo” as punishment. That’s how much I loved books. My parents always got the print version of The New York Times and always read it cover to cover, and I always gravitated toward the Arts section and the Style section, to film and music and art and fashion. I had my little Teen Vogue subscription, and I would look at my mom’s Vogue and InStyle, and even though it was mostly white people in those at that time, I would imagine myself in them, dreaming about the fashion and the glamour and the movies and the lights. With books and magazines, I love how time slows down, and you get to go somewhere else for a bit, sit still, and move through a different dimension. And I have books all over my home, art books decorating my living room, I like being surrounded by them.

If someone flipped through a magazine about your inner world, what kinds of images or moments do you think they’d find?

Little kid me, looking at Halle Berry and Denzel on the front page of the newspaper, the day after they won their Oscars, feeling so proud and excited, drawing her dress in my little notebook, imagining what my dress would look like on the red carpet, wanting to be there, longing to be part of it all.

If you could send a message back to the younger version of you who first started making things, what would you want them to know?

This thing you’re doing, that you love doing, someday, you’re going to get to do it as your career, and people are going to watch the things you make, and feel something that you felt that you put into it, and carry a piece of you with them, and be changed by it. This is for me now too.