My name is Kemmer Keswani Cope, and my first favorite thing in the world was Winnie the Pooh. I still remember watching my beloved Pooh bear get his head stuck in a cave wall and getting so worried over whether he would be okay. Looking back, that was the first time I experienced the power of stories, especially animation, to provoke empathy. As a Desi-American, nonbinary lesbian, I hold many “in-between” identities, and I found very few stories I could relate to growing up. I had to dig through so many layers of subtext just to find a piece of myself reflected back in media. It’s why I write the kinds of stories I do now.
Queer and trans people, biracial people, and survivors of diaspora are not only marginalized in most media but often simply forgotten. When they are written about, it’s largely through the lens of tragedy, but I am less interested in rehashing trauma than I am in healing and learning to find joy in “in-betweenness.”
I’m fascinated by all the shapes grief can take. The stabbing, hollow loss of a loved one, like having an organ ripped out. The creeping knowledge that you will inevitably leave those you love. The ringing longing for a life not lived, a lingering shadow that vanishes when you turn around. The walloping epiphany of recognizing your true self for the first time. Despite my fascination with grief, I always draw focus to the healing that follows such painful events rather than leaning into trauma itself as a venue for narrative. If tragedies are a perfect storm of circumstance and choice that leads to ruin, healing is much the same - it must begin with the desire and opportunity to abandon that path to ruin. So often, we see trauma, we see the effects of grief, and we see some moment of great catharsis - but this is only the first half of the story. Healing is not a single event on a beat sheet. I want to watch people make the impossibly hard decision, over and over, to shatter familiar destructive patterns and allow themselves to grow.
Someday, I want to work as a writer and showrunner for animated fantasy and sci-fi. For the past few years, I have been working in animation production at Wild Canary and ShadowMachine, eagerly learning different parts of the pipeline so that I may gain a broader understanding of how scripts come to life. I love working in animation and fantasy because anything can happen, and I figure if audiences can buy into talking dragons who breathe fire, they can cheer for a trans wizard.
