Nonfiction and fiction are both about asking questions and hopefully inviting a reader into an ongoing conversation. - Kaitlyn Greenidge

Read the books that are really messy. Read the books that everybody is telling you are problematic. And actually pick a part that word. When I was teaching, the last quarter of class I had to sort of be like, “we can’t use that word to talk about books because it means absolutely nothing.”

A lot of us come to writing because we love to read books and read very widely. And if you are a Black person or a person of color or a white woman or a woman of color or a Black woman, so many of the books that you’re told to read—“You love to read, read this book”—you’re not in them. Those books could be very wonderful and formative, but I think as a creator, you have to think about, where am I actually writing to and from, and what am I going to pull from? Am I going to pull from the tradition that is not necessarily my language, but I’ve been told is the language of fiction? Or do I pull from the things that are actually around me to make stories— make meaning for myself and for the people who I want to write to?

One of the things that guided how I was thinking about the ending was this Alice Walker quote, where she’s talking about writing The Color Purple and about what a radical act it is to give certain characters a happier, peaceful ending. I don’t know that Libertie necessarily has a happy ending, but she has an ending in which she is in a place of strength that she wasn’t necessarily before. That was really important for me, as an artistic and political choice. As I was writing the first draft, I was also teaching the Toni Morrison novel Love. I was reading a lot of her interviews around the time that book came out, and she did this really wonderful interview with Charlie Rose. He asks her about her characters being happy and she says something like, “They know something about themselves that they didn’t know before. And so in that way, they have won.” And she said, “Winning isn’t like your character gets a fancy car at the end or a big job, or gets the girl or anything like that. Winning is, they didn’t know something about themselves before and now they understand something about themselves fundamentally at the end of the narrative. And in that way, they have ‘won.’” And then she says, sort of very playfully, as she does in her interviews, she says, “I only write about winners.” So I think about that a lot when I’m writing and thinking about what sort of choices the characters make and why you may follow a character through a story and what that might look like when you’re writing.