One mantra of the last couple years that I’ve given myself is: we do not have time for shorthand anymore. We don’t have time to reduce things to its … - Kaitlyn Greenidge

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?

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

The work of a fiction writer is to take narrow experiences and explore the emotional vastness that’s within them.