Can you share a bit about your introduction to storytelling—which storytellers did you grow up on, and what in your opinion makes a good story?

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Even as a kid, I read really widely. There were books I read way too early like Dracula that I did not understand at all to reading Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry which is the first Black book I ever remember reading. It gave me questions about Reconstruction and life in the South that my teachers did not want to answer or maybe couldn’t answer for fifth grade me! And it gave me Cassie, who I remembered thinking was one of the smartest, most intense characters I had ever read at the time. She felt everything! She was complicated! I felt kinship with her because we were both Black girls with big, confusing emotions. And typing that to you, I think that’s who I’m consistently writing. Black girls with too many feelings that like art.

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In the acknowledgements you share that you’ve been writing short stories for most of your writing life, and that some of the stories in Black Arts have taken longer to write than your novels. What differs in the writing process, when you are working on shorter pieces versus a full-length novel?

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I think some of it is that with short stories, I’m happy to take my time! The first story in the collection, “The Sixth Door,” was a story I drafted in 2014 kept getting thoughtful rejections from different magazines, shelved, and then re-wrote when I wanted something else to write in the build up to my first novel, Lakewood, coming out. I sent it out to give myself something else to angst over (I was choosing to sit in a more familiar anxiety; which is a terrible coping method) and then revised it again when it accepted. That still took six years. I spend a lot of time letting short stories sit and trying to give myself more time to understand them.

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With novels, I often get completely immersed in them. Right now, I’m working on a new novel and I have a very sloppy first draft of it (around 55k) that will probably in the next two years turn into something more measured and much longer (probably 83k). I think the difference is with short stories I’m playing around and just letting whatever happens happen. With novels, I don’t outline but make a consistent list of things I either have questions about or things that I know are bad and need to fix. It is a very to-do list method where I’ll shape revisions and writing time around the things I instantly clock as worth writing to get the draft out but I would be embarrassed to show anyone else.

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What was the experience of writing these characters like? How does a character present themselves to you?

 

I think a lot about emotional distance and emotional access when I’m writing a character. It’s tied into the POV I choose—first is usually better for a character who might have things to say and emotions to process and third is a choice for someone who might have a lot of emotions or things she doesn’t want to touch emotionally or truths she doesn’t want to look at. It’s the third person’s super power, you can reveal things about your character which she might not be comfortable even admitting to herself.

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And then I spend a lot of time asking well, why does she care about this thing? What happened even before the story that might have shaped this?

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I’d love to hear about your writing set-up: where do you write from, do you have a favourite place or time of day to work, what do you surround yourself with as you write?

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My husband made me a beautiful desk out of butchers block. I have painted a very small room in my current house and decorated it. I rarely use them for anything but my day job as a professor. I still, despite what my physical therapist would like, write on the couch with a bunch of very big fuzzy pillows supporting my neck and wrists. There is usually a very big black cat or a smaller tuxedo cat trying to type with me or sleeping next to me.

A writing tip a teacher gave me in graduate school was to learn how to write anywhere. Write on the bus, write when you’re in a waiting room, write when you’re in a boring meeting if you can get away with it, go to a dinner or a coffee and give yourself even that space. While I would prefer a specific time and to be able to have a routine, my life doesn’t give me the space for that except in summers. I get a lot done because I took that advice.