SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE -- Q: What inspired Ripped?
“It was my second semester at San Francisco State, and I was taking a workshop with Peter Nachtrieb. He had us write lists of all these things, like really long, exciting words, short words, character names, subjects or themes we were really interested in, and he’d give us a minute for each one, and we’d write as much as we could down. He was like, ‘Now you have all these things to pull from when you’re looking for new stories, and you can go back to these.’ It was around this time that I started realizing that my process involved starting with theme more than character. So when I was looking over the list of things I had generated in his class, I realized that consent and sexual assault and rape were something that I was really interested in, but I didn’t want to approach it in the sense that I see it so often done.”