This excerpt has been lightly edited for clarity

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  Dani Shapiro: If I was sitting down to write thinking I was going to help people, I wouldn’t write as well… I’m trying to connect with people. This new book of mine is helping people, but as I was writing it, I was trying to tell the story and trying to place the story in a larger context. So there’s an extraordinary experience in realizing there’s a purpose to it, but a self-consciousness can set in if a writer sits down to think, ‘Now I’m going to sit down to help people.’

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  Richard Blanco: I think ‘connect’ is the perfect word.. and when those moments happen it’s great, but that’s not what keeps us writing per se. It is, though, just knowing and trusting that your honesty and life will be a mirror to someone else. That’s why we do what we do, but not consciously

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  Erika Mallin: [to Laymon] But do you feel that way?

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  Kiese Laymon: I definitely feel like it’s for a greater good… The act of writing books to [James] Baldwin, to my mother, to Margo Walker Alexander, is a liberatory act because I was aggressively taught not to see those people as audience to whom I could write. Your audience sort of dictates, I think, the integrity and calibrations of your art. So I’m definitely trying to write to black folks in the deep south, I’m trying to write for black folks in the deep south, with an understanding that people outside the deep south will take part in it. But I know who my primary audience is.