Ruhshona and I worked on the personal essay for 3 months straight. At a certain point, I was so used to that story that I couldn’t tell whether anything was missing so I asked several of my American roommates to take a look.
Each version of the essay was also reviewed on consultations with
@valeranotes, and Ruhshona would be so incredibly dedicated to this process that she would show up at the meetings with me with each one of Valera’s said sentences written like Tarantino dialogues. That was the moment I knew she would get in.