I’m very interested in presenting the truth of people who are not centered in mainstream narratives. But I’m also fascinated by how we construct our … - Peace Adzo Medie

I’ve been impacted by many books, but one that has profoundly impacted me as a writer is Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. After reading it as a teenager, I began to think seriously about how I could use words to create images and to effectively show the reader what I was thinking. Before then, my focus had been on producing fiction to entertain myself.

My identify plays a huge role in my writing. I’m Black, Ghanaian, and a woman, and one of the reasons I wrote His Only Wife was that I was hungry for stories of Black women just living their lives and doing regular things. In the social sciences, we know—although some continue to resist this truth—that our identities matter for our research: They matter for what we research, how we conduct our research, and how we write our findings. In the same way, I think our identities matter for the stories we tell and how we tell them.

The transition probably happened when I was working on my doctoral dissertation. Around that time, I started sending out short stories. Short stories were more manageable because, in some ways, submitting them was similar to submitting academic research articles. So I think it was easy for me to do. But I remember going online, because I didn't know much about publishing or people in publishing - I only knew one person who was a writer before I published my book. I went on Google and searched, ‘how do you publish a book?’ and the steps just seemed so overwhelming.