"Writing takes a great deal of sweat. [...] It's during the painstaking redrafting process that the music of [the] work emerges." - Underline magazine (Summer 2017/2018), Penguin Motherlands is based on real people’s lives and history. As such, I owe it to the memory of my mother and grandmother to portray them as dynamic if sometimes flawed women of their generations. The documentation available generated myriad questions, some of which crept out of the shadows. And what I