An excerpt from Rev. Dale Fredrickson’s interview with Denver-based poet and activist Dominique Christina.

For my children one of the things that was most useful to me in trying to curate language for them, that would give them the most room, the most space, was to explain to them that you are, we are, I am a concept. A beautiful designed concept, is where the word conception comes from. You are your parents’ best idea. You got here and constructs were forced upon you. We know that a construct is built from without. There’s a rainforest and that’s a concept. But if I clear those trees to build a nightclub, the nightclub is the construct. In creating that construct I had in that clearing things had to die. Things that were organic had to die to accommodate that construct.

What you want to do is insist on a life that is amplifying the conception of you not the construction of you. That construct those constructs could never tell the story of who you actually are. You are a concept. You are whole and perfect and complete, and then constructs start hammering on you. Minimizing certain things, amplifying other things, forgetting certain things. No, you want to live a life that is about the amplification of the concept of you. That’s what I try to do. That’s the invitation. That’s the invitation for my children. A whole lot of things should not have to die in order for you to be a version of the story that other folks think is the most palatable.