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G. Willow Wilson [1982-0] American

Rank: 101
Writer

Gwendolyn Willow Wilson, known professionally as G. Willow Wilson, is an American comics writer, prose author, essayist, and journalist.

Attitude, Environmental

Quote	Tags	Rank
I think all these pop cultural media often reflect conversations we're having in the real world at that moment in time. I think one of the big conversations we're having as a culture is we thought we'd solved sexism and racism, and we're realizing more and more that we haven't.		101
To me, a staircase looks like a series of dark and light horizontal stripes, which is exactly how you'd draw a staircase. So I know how the image is going to look on the page.		102
We don't want to create a literary ghetto in which black writers are only allowed to write black characters and women writers are put on 'girl books.'		103
'Butterfly Mosque' came out of the emails I wrote to family and friends back home after moving to Egypt.		104
Muslims are ordinary members of the working public, just like you.		105
If you love things or ideas or people that contradict each other, you have to be prepared to fight for every square inch of intellectual real estate you occupy.		106
It seems like whenever you write about Muslims, people assume that you're writing about the Quran, you are writing about the Prophet Muhammad. There's no sense that Muslims are capable of individualism, that they're capable of making mistakes that are somehow not connected to Islam.		107
A lot of my writer friends - some of whom are brilliant - work when the Muse calls them, for lack of a better description. You know, days of nothing, then this creative burst where they write for 36 hours straight fueled by caffeine and idealism.		108
Despite all the criticisms that have been leveled at the comics community, both in terms of fans and creators, I have always felt more comfortable and accepted in the comics community than I have in any other medium of publishing that I've had the pleasure of working in.		109
In comics, we're all weird together. I can go to a comics convention and not stand out, even though I'm the only woman in a headscarf there, because the guy next to me has a beard and a Sailor Moon costume.		110
I write about real life as it is lived by the young American Muslim women that I've had the pleasure of meeting throughout the course of my travels as a writer and being able to speak in different places and meet different people at signings and things.		111
Being a Muslim in America, I've noticed that there's a ton of crossover between the Muslim community and geekdom.		112
When I need guidance or just to kvetch or to bounce ideas off of people, I go to Gail Simone, who is very much kind of the den mother of all of us who are working comics.		113
I was born in New Jersey and lived there until I was about 10, so Jersey is in my roots.		114
Superheroes don't often get their powers in one fell swoop. It's like superhero puberty.		115
When you write for a comic series, many superheroes have 60 or some years of history that you are coming into.		116
As a writer and a mom, I wish I could split into two or three different people so I could be with my kids all day, write all day, and go out and do the interviews all day. Multiplicity woman!		117
People love to talk about new and different. They don't always love to buy and read new and different.		118
I think people, especially in the Muslim community, are rightly cautious any time you hear, 'Oh, there's going to be a Muslim character.'		119
That's something the head scarf, in a symbolic way, is meant to do in Arabic culture: it defines your relationship to your husband and the men of your family differently than your relationship to the average guy on the street you've never met.		120
The great thing about Cairo is the vast majority of women wear some kind of head scarf, but they are also very fashion-conscious. They love bright colors.		121
I think any time you have a super team, whether it's all men or all women or both, what you have are people with very unique strengths that aren't always totally compatible.		122
I think that's a huge theme in superhero books across the board: When you have this massive power, how do you use it responsibly? When do you intervene? Those are the big questions.		123
I have younger friends who are in this pinch where they feel they've been counted out before they've had a chance to prove themselves. They've inherited a lot of debt - not just student debt but environmental debt, political debt. They really feel squeezed.	Environmental	124
I think comics are really part of The Zeitgeist. They reflect back to us the issues that we're concerned about in the time they are written.		125
So many people are of mixed heritage; everyone is from somewhere else.		126
I keep setting the bar higher for myself in terms of what I'm trying to accomplish.		201
Sometimes, by using the most over-the-top, ridiculous plot device you can imagine, you get some interesting little conflicts and cool things that you might not otherwise have a chance to explore.		202
Some languages expand not only your ability to speak to different people but what you're able to think.		203
I'm not a programmer myself, but I am a very, very picky end user of technology. I like my machines to work they way they're supposed to, all the time.		204
In many countries in the Middle East - and this is changing in the wake of the Arab Spring - but for a long time, censorship of books and film was a very big deal. There were books you couldn't buy; things with political content would be censored, but there were some genres of books and film that the censors just didn't understand.		205
I'm writing in English; I'm writing for a Western audience, but the people I'm surrounded by in my daily life are mostly non-white.		206
Americans look at the Middle East as a source of trauma because of 9/11. At the same time, I could see the fear going on in the Middle East as well - which would be the next country to be invaded or sanctioned? Being around those tensions was traumatic for me.		207
When we read fiction, we want to get outside of ourselves and are able to see from a perspective we haven't seen through before. That can be very powerful.		208
The 'Ms. Marvel' mantle has passed to 'Kamala Khan,' a high school student from Jersey City who struggles to reconcile being an American teenager with the conservative customs of her Pakistani Muslim family.		209
When I am in Egypt, I am along for the ride - I am a privileged outsider, but an outsider nonetheless.		210
I think every Muslim woman has to feel the world out for herself.		211
In the West, anything that must be hidden is suspect; availability and honesty are interlinked. This clashes irreconcilably with Islam, where the things that are most precious, most perfect and most holy are always hidden: the Kaaba, the faces of prophets and angels, a woman's body, Heaven.		212
I don't know that Islam has ever been a subject of anything that I've written. I think Muslims have often been, but those are two very different things.		213
There's a burden of representation that comes into play when there aren't enough representatives of a certain group in popular culture.		214
It's patently impossible for a Muslim character to represent 'all Muslims.'		215
I think lot of Muslims have gotten fatigued by the way Muslim characters, even 'positive' ones, are portrayed in the media.		216
Because the traditional mode of dress for Muslim women is so distinct - the headcovering, which is not there for guys - women carry a greater burden of representation than Muslim men do in non-Muslim societies.		217
The first comic I ever read was an 'X-Men' themed anti-smoking PSA they gave out in health class when I was about 10.		218
Anytime you're writing stories about a group of people with whom you have limited experience, there's a lot of guesswork.		219
What we wanted to do was tell a story that felt relatable to anyone who's been a teenager. We haven't all been a second-generation Pakistani-American girl with superpowers, but we've all been 16 and awkward.		220
I've wanted to write comics ever since I figured out it was a job.		221
'Lost' makes a lot of sense to me, philosophically.		222
To me, writing an ongoing series feels like driving a freight train downhill. All you can do is steer and pray.		223
The more you put out there, the more you have to resolve. 'Air' is the most literary comic I've written so far, and that poses problems.		224
My synesthesia is mostly gone - it was a much bigger factor when I was a kid. But having no depth perception is a bonus when you're trying to lay out flat images and describe them to an artist - flat is all I see.		225
'Air' is very placeless - it's set in many different countries, and much of the story is about going places rather than being places. 'Air' is about travelers, and I'm a chronic traveler.		226
It took me a long time to square with the fact that none of my experiences are typical - I'm not a typical American, but I'm also not a typical Muslim.		301
The script for what would eventually become my first graphic novel, 'Cairo,' sort of came to me in kind of a bolt of lightning within 24 hours of having moved to that city. Just a jumble of characters and narratives and interesting things that I was seeing and experiencing for the first time.		302
In prose, you have a lot more room for digression, for very meaty kinds of dialogues. In graphic novels, you're writing haiku-length dialogue. Your job is to be efficient, to get out of the way of the art.		303
I don't want to compare myself to somebody like Fitzgerald or Hemingway, but I feel like, for some writers, going to a certain city, a certain place, is what kickstarts your imaginative process.		304
I tend to deal with characters who are sort of at that same point of wrestling with, 'Who am I going to be as an adult? What do I believe? How am I defining myself in the context of my culture and my peer groups, my family?'		305
In Arab Islamic society, it is traditionally taboo to criticize the lifestyle or personal philosophy of any practicing Muslim.		306
For most inhabitants of the Arab world, the prevailing cultural attitude toward women - fed and encouraged by Wahhabi doctrine, which is based on Bedouin social norms rather than Islamic jurisprudence - often trumps the rights accorded to women by Islam.	Attitude	307
'Lost' seems to be the inverse of 'Air': It explores dispossession and identity by forcing a bunch of people into one invented landscape instead of using many invented landscapes to keep people apart.		308
'Air' is what the world looks like: An inconvenient mashup of human politics and divine geography. We leave bits and pieces of ourselves and our history in every place we encounter.		309
Leaving your country at a tender age really rearranges the way you perceive the world. So I feel marginally attached to many places rather than deeply attached to any one place.		310
The 'Islam vs. the West' dialogue ceased to be about real people a long time ago.		311
I do hope the success of 'Ms. Marvel' will open doors for other characters and other creators.		312
There is a certain danger in thinking about diversity in its own little box, as something that is somehow separate from 'normal' comic books and comics creators.		313
Ninety percent of the comic books I've written in the past had little or nothing to do with Islam.		314
In 2003, as a 21-year-old convert to Islam, I moved from Colorado to Cairo to see what life was like in a Muslim country.		315
We think of divinity as something infinitely big, but it is also infinitely small - the condensation of your breath on your palms, the ridges in your fingertips, the warm space between your shoulder and the shoulder next to you.		316
The road to democracy is rarely smooth, but for Egyptian women, it has been exceptionally bumpy.		317
The transition between life in red-state America and life in the Arab capital was at times overwhelming because of the traditional segregation of men and women in many public and private settings.		318
For me, insomnia was something ordinary, and it came and went for ordinary reasons.		319
The Qur'an is in many ways far less concrete than the Bible, relying on the esoteric more often than the apparent.		320
An ambitious, surreal tale of the love between a young Arab girl sold into marriage and the orphan boy she adopts, 'Habibi' spans multiple eras of conflict and change, stretching the lifetimes of its two protagonists over many centuries.		321
The Qur'an is God's property, not mine.		322
'Habibi' is a complex and unapologetic work of fantasy - no idle undertaking for readers of any faith or no faith at all, but one well worth the trouble.		323
Most people know Muslims in their community but don't realize it.		324
In all likelihood, you've been treated by a Muslim doctor or served by a Muslim waiter or worked beside a Muslim computer programmer. Even if you think, 'I don't know any Muslims,' it's probably not true.		325
I don't think being a writer who is religious means you have to write about nothing but religion. When I do write about religion, it's to inform the story, not to push a certain agenda.		326
I don't think there's something inherently irreligious about comics.		401
There are very religious people who write comics and who love comics.		402
Thematically, in a lot of what I write, there's a sense of displacement, of being rooted in multiple places, and how that can tug at your identities and your wants and your goals.		403
I didn't believe in spiritual homelands, and found God as readily in a strip mall as in a mosque.		404
My faith did not require beauty or belonging - the deeper I went into my practice, the less it required at all.		405
I discovered I was a monotheist... That rules out polytheism. I have also had a problem with authority, which rules out any religion with a priesthood or leader who claims to be God's representative on Earth.		406
Islam is antiauthoritarian, sex-positive monotheism.		407
Comic book readers tend to be pretty secular and anti-authoritarian; nothing is above satire in their eyes.		408
It's very difficult to balance different audiences and talk to each one without selling the others short. There is no universal literature - or, if there is, I don't know how to write it.		409
My career is a black comedy of sorts. I spent a lot of time explaining myself to various different groups. But more and more, I'm finding that the desire to communicate, which all these audiences share, is a powerful thing.		410
Real tolerance means respecting other people even when they baffle you and you have no idea why they think what they think.		411
The story of a passionate woman in a stale marriage is as old as Helen of Troy.		412
Out-marriage is an issue religious groups have been wrestling with for some time. Of course men and women fall in love. Of course it's not always convenient to their respective cultural and spiritual norms.		413
Choosing a spouse with religion in mind is not always a mistake, especially if your heritage and your faith are important parts of who you are. The trick is, as always, to recognize a good thing when you see it - and never mistake the bad for something more.		414

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