Making Artifacts

Kaitlyn Greenidge has worked as a park ranger, a phone banker, and an app designer, all while writing the essays and reviews that launched her career. She maintains a refreshingly eclectic approach to her profession, freely and boldly cutting through categories—in discussing her work, it’s not quite right to separate the novelist from the critic from the editor. In an essay for The New York Times about the aesthetics and ethics of cultural appropriation, she draws on drafts of her first novel, We Love You, Charlie Freeman, and evaluates them with the disciplined passion of a critic. 

As features director at Harper’s Bazaar, when she commissions an oral history about Black punk or a photo essay about protests held in defense of Black trans people, she edits with the fine-tuned ear of a novelist, placing different characters in conversation: protesters, performers, community organizers, models. Whether writing a profile of Solange Knowles or historical fiction about Susan Smith McKinney Steward—the first Black woman to become a doctor in New York state—she is alert to the nuances of region, race, and class.

Greenidge has received fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, and the Guggenheim Foundation. I’m delighted to have her as our second guest on “The Art of Editing.”

Merve Emre: A lot of people in this audience are in the same position you were once as a student at Wesleyan. Can you tell us how you got from where they are today to where you are now?

Kaitlyn Greenidge: I came to Wesleyan after taking a year off from college and working in Anchorage for the Alaska public television station. That had been like playing at being a grown-up, and then I got to come back and very self-consciously play at being a college student—not having to care about rent anymore, just throwing myself into college life. After college, I scrounged around for a year, doing odd jobs like phone banking and secretarial work. I happened to see an advertisement on Craigslist for a job at a Black history museum in Brooklyn called the Weeksville Heritage Center—the original job posting said that it was to start a community garden. When my mom would ask me, “What are you doing with your life?” I would say, “My ideal job is to work on a farm all day and party all night.”  

I ended up working at Weeksville for about five or six years. It was a really extraordinary time to be working there, because there were a bunch of people who were super interested in cultural programming and public events, and had ideas that were twenty years ahead of their time. In terms of understanding the radical possibility of a Black history museum as a public space in which community care and community preservation could coexist, they had gotten a grant for starting a farmer’s market, which I helped set up and run, but I was also working on projects like their oral history program, interviewing surviving members of the Great Migration about their journeys to Brooklyn.

At Wesleyan, I had been a Mellon Minority Undergraduate Fellow (now called the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow), a program that encouraged students of color to enter Ph.D. programs and become professors. So it was always in the back of my mind that I had this fellowship fulfillment. I would apply to Ph.D. programs in American history and think, Well, if I become an academic, I can just write novels on the side. I’d get really close to going and then in, like, late August, I would defer. I did that two times in a row, and then realized you can’t really do that. You get blackballed after a while.

I applied for an MFA at Hunter College in New York, because Hunter College classes were at night so I could keep my job at Weeksville. I didn’t really understand why I needed to keep the job, it was just a gut feeling. Also, Hunter College at that time was low cost. Now it’s no cost, but at that time, it was $5,000 a year, so it was very affordable. I didn’t want to go into debt. They also had a program where, instead of being a teaching fellow, you were an assistant to a writer. I was an assistant to Colson Whitehead my first semester.

I think everyone wants to hear about that.

I was a terrible assistant. He also wasn’t working on fiction at the time. He was sort of in between books and teaching a class at Princeton. He would ask me to go find this or that out-of-print novel, and I’d go find it for him. He was writing his book about playing poker. Once, he had me research the origins of Go Fish. I don’t think that ended up going anywhere. But it was good to see the general life of a writer and a mind in the world. 

When I was at Hunter, I started working on my first novel. One of the things they tell you when you write a novel for the first time is that you have to come up with a list of essay topics that you might write about for publicity, which is really counterintuitive for fiction writers. You’re not trained in nonfiction, but all of a sudden you’re being asked to write these essays. So I was always keeping that in the back of my mind, and eventually started to send those out. One of them got picked up by The New York Times, and the editor there, Rachel Dry, she really understood my thoughts, and asked me to keep pitching her, which I did. She came to me with commissions for essays like “Who Gets to Write What?”

I also wrote a personal essay around that time on doll houses and miniatures, about being obsessed with them growing up, and it was published in Elle. Lena Dunham’s newsletter, Lenny Letter, was just starting out and had a partnership with Elle. She read that essay and really liked it. (She also has an obsession with miniatures.) Based on that piece, she invited me to be a staff writer at Lenny Letter, and I was, from around 2016 to 2019. It was a really small staff of writers. There were only three or four of us pitching every week. I wrote a couple of longer reported essays for the Times and for Lenny, built up a large number of clips, and was sort of on my freelance way.

When Doreen St. Félix was here last year, she also talked about working for Lenny Letter. It seems like a microgenerational moment in media history.

It wasn’t around for that long, but it did foster a bunch of people like Doreen, who I was never on staff with. She left for The New Yorker just as I came on. But one of the fun things about working there was both writing and commissioning pieces. They stressed wanting first-time writers and first-time bylines. Since I’ve been at Harper’s Bazaar, that’s been important to me. Especially when I first started. I wanted to make sure that the writers I commissioned were not necessarily the people who had been published in the magazine before.

I’m curious about your process as an editor. Some editors want to talk on the phone, and then the second draft is when line edits happen. Some want to workshop the idea together before anything is on the page. And others want to see a draft before they give any feedback. What is your process like?

It depends who I’m working with. Most of the time, somebody will send in a draft so that we have something in front of us. But sometimes it starts with a phone call, like the piece we did on giving up the apps and dating post-pandemic. I’d pitched that idea to our general board of editors and said, I think there’s something here, I think it could be a print feature for us. The writer Sarah Thankam Mathews was my first choice. I thought she would be an excellent fit. And then the piece emerged from a series of conversations I had with Sarah over a long period of time, talking about the underlying questions, about how she might might approach the piece and what we wanted to make sure she touched on.

But there’s also the kind of piece that comes about when someone pitches you.

When I first started at Harper’s Bazaar, I was commissioning from pitches all the time. My idea was that I would leave the gates wide open and receive pitches from anyone and everyone, commissioning everything. But a big part of being an editor is saying no, which took me a long time to figure out. How do you say no to a piece in a way that makes sense?

How do you say no in a way that makes sense?

I had been on the other side of pitching for so long I would agonize over saying no, with long, long e-mails explaining the no. Sometimes writers would respond and say, What do you mean? But sometimes you just don’t want them in your inbox. So it was a relief to realize that not every piece needs a long, considered no. Sometimes it is kinder to your time and to the writer’s to just say, “No thank you.” And sometimes you will say no in the kindest way possible, and people will still blast you on Twitter, saying what an awful experience they had. Ultimately, you just got to say no and keep it moving.

How did your work as a novelist and essayist shape the way you thought about commissioning and editing pieces?

When I was in grad school, one of my professors, Peter Carey, always said that a novel is just a book with a lot of ideas. For me, that really resonated. That’s what makes me excited, in part, to read fiction, and it dovetails with what nonfiction and long-form work is to me. I’m most interested in the kinds of ideas that appeal to novelists, the ones where there is no real resolution, the ones open to interpretation. Those are the kinds of nonfiction pieces I’m drawn to. When I had my day job, I would spend so much time just reading the archives of Texas Monthly and Vanity Fair and New York for that kind of reporting and storytelling with no clear resolution, where it’s really just about the journey to an idea.

Can you give an example of a piece that you’ve either commissioned or written in which you feel like there is no resolution and there is that novelistic, loose grab bag of ideas?

I commissioned a piece from this writer named C. Syl’violet Smith, out of Columbia University’s MFA program, that I ended up titling, “When Black Excellence Isn’t Enough.” She’s from a working-class Black neighborhood in New Jersey, and the piece is about going to grad school and being around all of these upper-middle-class Black people and not having a place. She talks about sitting down to write her application to grad school and saying she’s been traumatized, deciding she’s going to use this trauma to get a scholarship any way that she can—forcing her story to be marketable and legible in a certain way. But then she arrives at Columbia where people supposedly “look like her” and still feels completely disconnected. There’s no resolution to that.

When it came out people got very mad on Twitter, saying this was anti-Black. But it was also very exciting to read, because there is no correct answer. Why did they think it was anti-Black? She writes about her family, and doesn’t say that her family is noble because they’re poor. She says that being poor fucking sucks, and it does. It’s not a necessarily defiant existence. Sometimes it’s just being at home with your mom and being like, I wish we didn’t live in this crappy apartment.

How do you think about writing for places whose editors have different politics from your own?

I’m not one of those writers who sees a division between writing and politics. I think they’re always married and deeply entrenched in each other. If you’re a writer telling yourself that isn’t the case, then you already have a blind spot in your own work—and then it’s a matter of figuring out your political biases. I don’t think bias is necessarily a bad word. Figure out the ways that a bias can work for you as a writer, in a particular piece.

In terms of working with an editor whose political bent might be different than my own, that involves having a discussion around a piece, and knowing when those discussions are in good faith. I will say, editing is one of the last places where you can, one-on-one, have a good faith conversation about those things. Because the best editors, ultimately, are interested in good writing. They can have different politics than you and still want to make a piece work.

I’m interested in the idea that the editorial relationship is the last place where you can have a good-faith conversation. On the one hand, I feel buoyed by that, and on the other hand, I feel really depressed.

It’s incredibly depressing. I mean, it depends on the outlet—with most of the outlets we’re talking about, it’s the fact-checker in the background making sure both of you are minding your ps and qs when you’re having this conversation. But it is also incredibly depressing, because how many of us are getting edited on a regular basis? The economics of media at this particular period in time mean that more and more publications don’t edit very much at all. And the learning period you need to be able to edit well, with sensitivity and taste and tact, is impossible to sustain because of layoffs and the deliberate defunding of considered, professional media.

One of my persistent experiences when I’m being edited is when I get the first round of comments back, and my ego rages. “This person doesn’t know what they’re talking about!” I think. “This idiot! How dare they!” As a writer and editor, how do you get your ego out of the way, on both sides of that relationship, so that the good-faith discussion can come to the fore?

I think by realizing that the purpose of writing is not to make your ego feel good. The purpose is ultimately the piece. The reader is never going to be in your house, sitting right beside you, seeing how wonderful and interesting and oh-so-smart you are. They have only the words on the page. For me as a writer, if I really don’t agree with what an editor is saying, the question is: Can I point to a place in the writing that refutes them? Then it sort of becomes like a legal document. Hopefully your work is strong enough that it can withstand those challenges.

You’ve talked quite provocatively about resisting publication in places that “Blackwash,” as you put it—publishing Black authors in order to offset pieces by white authors that are implicitly, or explicitly, racist. Can you talk a little bit about how that fits into your editorial politics, and what the role of good faith or bad faith plays in resistance to Blackwashing?

This is where it gets really tricky, because outlets are made up of many different people and many different editors. You can be working with an editor who is working in good faith, and you really trust this person, but the larger editorial board is not operating in good faith at all. I shy away from the idea that every writer must boycott “x” publication. It’s an incredibly personal decision. For me, it’s when I notice a certain tendency.

I’ll give an example. In the spring of 2020 I’d written an essay for The New York Times’s Sunday Review about Toni Cade Bambara, about reading The Salt Eaters during the pandemic, and about fiction that speaks directly to health and healing. The Times had commissioned it, and they were going to run it the same weekend they ran Senator Tom Cotton’s op-ed “Send in the Troops,” where he essentially argued that we should be mowing down protesters. I pulled the essay. I think the Cotton op-ed came out on Thursday, and my essay was going to come out that Friday or Saturday. I felt in a way they weren’t even my own words—they were Bambara’s words, and I don’t want to be cursed by Toni Cade Bambara, have her come back from the dead and be like, What are you doing?

But more seriously, while op-ed pages can represent voices of all kinds, I think there is a difference between saying, “We should kill protesters” and saying, “I have questions about the First Amendment.”  We are in a world right now where we’ve conflated those two things, and I disagree that calling for explicit violence is the same thing as saying I disagree with you. They’re not the same. They’re just not. And it wasn’t just anyone; it was an elected official calling explicitly for violence.

So I was noticing a pattern at the Times of commissioning Black writers and writers of color to write these essays saying, like, “We’re human too,” and then in a week, they would publish something completely denigrating Black history or Latino history or whatever was the bogeyman of the week for the right. I think those patterns need to be called out, and it’s tricky because not everybody who works at the Sunday Review agrees with those patterns. There are other things in play, decision makers who are completely invisible to us contributing to how those decisions get made. But for myself, there is one small thing I can do, which is to say I don’t want to participate in this at this moment.

Compared to The New York Times, I’m curious how you think about what Harper’s Bazaar is, and how it, as an entity, aligns with you and your work as an editor and a writer?

When I started at Harper’s Bazaar, what intrigued me was the magazine’s long history of literary experimentation. We were one of the first American magazines to publish Virginia Woolf. We also published Truman Capote super early on. There is the now famous issue of 1965, which was edited by Richard Avedon and had essays by James Baldwin, Tom Wolfe, and Renata Adler. It’s always had space for interesting and beautiful writing. So that’s what drew me to it. I have had a lot of freedom figuring out what to focus on and bring into the magazine. You know, we are a fashion magazine. We’re not a news magazine or a politics magazine, but we are a fashion magazine that touches on those issues through the lens of culture, so I look for pieces that are of the moment, but with a sideways approach. We don’t have a neat resolution, like a strict op-ed would have.

What is something you’ve commissioned that feels to you like a quintessential Harper’s Bazaar piece?

There’s one piece we did for the election titled “What Does Caste Have to Do with Kamala Harris?” My sister, a history professor at Tufts, was running a retreat for academics who write about Blackness and race called the Du Bois Forum. They held it the weekend Harris announced she was going to run, and one of the people there was a scholar at Harvard who writes mostly about Indian Americans in tech. She was talking about how we have these two women, Kamala Harris and Usha Vance, who are from this political class—tech entrepreneurs and workers from India who, because of immigration policies, are often all upper caste. This group has enormous power, wealth, and resources, but most of our political press doesn’t cover it. We don’t cover the Indian tech class as an entity, like we do with Black voters or white working-class voters.

That really fascinated me, and so I commissioned Tanvi Misra, who writes about immigration and labor, and she wrote a wonderful piece about the history of Indian immigration to the US—particularly the rise of Hindu supremacy as a force in politics, particularly in California—and how these two women, Harris and Vance, are intimately connected through familial background and through their professions to this political and cultural group.

As you were talking, I had a visual of these two women in my mind, because, of course, many of your pieces for Harper’s Bazaar are going to place as much emphasis on the visual as they do on the verbal. For instance, the two oral histories I mentioned in my introduction, on the history of Black punk and on the 2020 protest movements in New York City in defense of Black trans lives, are gorgeously and, in some cases, quite upsettingly photographed. How do you think about putting together oral history with photography? And how did those pieces come to a fashion magazine?

For the piece on the Stonewall Protests, I didn’t have a hand in commissioning the photos. Ryan McGinley had already documented the protests and the question was, What text is going to accompany them? I suggested an oral history, because I absolutely adore oral histories.

As a writer, I love hearing people describe their own lives. And for a long time I did the oral histories at Weeksville, where we were interviewing people who were in their seventies and eighties, people who had grown up in the neighborhood in the 1920s and 1930s. It was fascinating to hear the old slang from that time. There was one old woman who used to say, “That woman was smelling herself”—meaning she’s too full of herself. That kind of stuff is really exciting as a fiction writer, and it also pulled me toward nonfiction.

Before I started freelancing, one of the books I read over and over again was an oral history of punk in New York called Please Kill Me and its sequel, a history of the porn industry in New York called The Other Hollywood. When I started writing in high school, one of my first writing teachers gave me a bunch of Studs Terkel books. As a teenager, I loved reading that work.

So for the protests, I thought let’s do an oral history. I enjoy them and feel like, ethically, they make sense. Some people at this Stonewall protest had never protested before in their lives. Other people had been protesting for ten or fifteen years. An oral history can capture all of that. Some people were deeply militant, others were like, I’m just here for the songs. It felt right to do an oral history because you could represent all of that.

It strikes me that there is some implicit good faith baked into that, especially at a moment when protesters are often being portrayed as being one thing.

A hundred percent, and I think the question of why a person joins a protest is super interesting, and is not often asked when a reporter is reporting on, for lack of a better definition, a leftist protest.

Why were people joining the protests?

I remember one person saying that she had been maybe nine or ten when Ferguson happened, and so she was sort of like, This is just my life now. This has been my life for the last six years. A very young trans woman said, This is how I understand the world at this point. I don’t see any other way of being in the world and getting things done. And then there was another person, also a trans woman. Her dad was a cop. She’d been brought up to distrust protesters. But she’s a Black trans woman. She joins a protest, and all of a sudden the police are treating her like garbage. And she’s like, “Oh my God, these things my dad told me about being a cop are not the whole story of what it means to police. What does that mean?”

It strikes me that there’s a tension between what you’re doing at Harper’s Bazaar and what a fashion magazine often does, which is profile celebrities. You’ve profiled Solange Knowles, for example. I’m wondering how you square the circle of publishing oral histories with something like the intense focus on individuality that comes out with a celebrity profile?

The challenge is getting somebody to say something new about their life and to feel comfortable being vulnerable. With Solange, I was really lucky, because she loves history and archives. So it was like, all right, I’m just gonna go in and nerd out about this as explicitly as possible and see if she picks up the wavelength, which she did. Thank God.

Which archive did you two nerd out about?

We talked about the archives at Howard University. I also mentioned in passing this feminist history podcast that I listen to, and she was like, Wait, what’s the name? I was like, I don’t want to say the name of this podcast out loud, because it’s so cringy. It’s called “Dirty, Sexy History.” And she was like, “Oh, okay.” I like to think she was making a mental note of it.

Does what you’re doing meet with any resistance at Harper’s Bazaar? Do you feel like what you’re doing is changing the way that the magazine thinks about its traditional subject material?

The privilege of working there is that they’ve always been super supportive. The people who brought me in, Leah Chernikoff, our executive editor, and Samira Nasr, our editor-in-chief, are very thoughtful about what it means to put somebody on a cover of this magazine. I share my office with our art director, and she has a lineup of all of the magazines since our masthead has come on. And when you look at the covers—I’m not a visual person, so it took me a year to realize this—it’s a story. They’re all in conversation with one another.

I’ll give an example. One of the first cover stories I did for them was on Tracee Ellis Ross. I see the cover photograph of her, and then I see the cover photograph of Regina King maybe eighteen months later—very different photographs. But when you see the women in between them, you see how the arc of the issues is building up to Regina King. And then you also see how the stories are in conversation with each other. They both talk about growing older as an artist or an actor in Hollywood, about loss. I feel like what I do is very much in tune with what is happening in the rest of the magazine.

Do you ever look at the story that other covers are telling, like the covers of Vogue?

Not really, but I do think a lot about what it means to have a physical object like a magazine, and what it means to write something for that physical object. You know, I graduated from college twenty years ago, when print magazines had a very different place in culture—both popular culture and general culture. Print magazines are still very important to me. So when I think about writing for a magazine today, it has a gravity for me that I don’t know younger writers necessarily feel. But I love the potential of what those spaces can be. I think that they’re wonderful artifacts.