Jacqueline Berkman

I wouldn’t say I have a particularly bleak or dystopian sensibility. Yet, when I am asked why I write, Morpheus’ quote from The Matrix echoes back to me: “What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind.”



I know this splinter well. After all, I grew up in Santa Monica, California, a coastal paradise full of inconsistencies: beachside estates overlooking homeless encampments, equalitarian ideals espoused on bullhorns at shopping centers where half the stores were vacant because of exorbitant rents. At my large public high school, fights between different racial and socioeconomic groups would erupt at lunchtime and sometimes turn violent, resulting in mandated campus-wide lockdowns, students hastily ditching their bags of chips to quarantine in their fifth-period classrooms while the seagulls descended for leftovers.



To process these events, I wrote about them, and nearly 20 years later, many of these same themes remain my primary fascination and focus. It’s no secret that the world is wildly unfair, and I am particularly interested in telling the stories of people for whom the scales are not tipped in their favor. This often includes women, people in disadvantaged socioeconomic groups, or those grappling with silent grievances or disabilities that leave them cast off into the fringes of society.. 



I don’t have any didactic or moral agenda. I write because I love to. But I hope, in the course of this work, that I help our world recognize how stories help us understand other perspectives and viewpoints, cultivate our sense of compassion and humanity, and remove the splinters that gnaw at our minds.