ON SUNDAYS, SHE PICKED FLOWERS, LINER NOTES: Abridged

because you gon' have to spend a lil $ to go deeper into my mind

There is no such thing as art without inspiration. We are a visual and sensual people, likely to draw influence and ideas from the most benign of experiences. A piece of music, a photograph, a painting— you cannot get through the process of writing without having had something guide your aesthetics.

On Sundays, She Picked Flowers is a culmination of eight years of watching, listening, and observing. It is the end result of my being raised in the Black baptist church, of generational violence and trauma, of my lived experiences as a very lonely, and a little touched, Black lesbian. You can't separate these truths from the novel. I am Black, so my characters are Black and do Black things and have Black thoughts, Black experiences. I'm a lesbian and so my characters tend to be lesbians, tend to see the world through pink-white-orange lenses, even if they don't have the language we have now in 2024.

Finally, after all these years of watching and listening and observing, I can show off my non-exhaustive list of inspirations and influences for On Sundays, She Picked Flowers. Likely, there will be more— I still have plans for showing off the three playlists I made— but for now, there are these movies, videos, books and a few articles that have informed the novel.