12 or 20 (second series) questions with Tamara Jong

Tamara Jong is a Tiohtià:ke (Montréal) born writer of Chinese and European ancestry. Her work has been published in the Humber Literary Review, Room Magazine, and The Fiddlehead, and has been both long and shortlisted for various creative nonfiction prizes. She is a graduate of The Writer's Studio at Simon Fraser University, and a former member of Room Magazine’s collective. She currently lives and works on Treaty 3 territory, the occupied and ancestral lands of the Haudenosaunee, Anishinabewaki, Attiwonderonk, and Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation (Guelph, ON). Worldly Girls is her first book

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

In every way! I’ve had some readers reach out that I wouldn’t have met if not for Worldly Girls and for that I am very grateful. It also means that all those years taking courses, writing, re-writing, doing workshops, and submitting and submitting work has all come to something tangible. I didn’t start off wanting to necessarily write this memoir. I had wanted to write a book but it was going to be a book of fiction. That seems so far away now. I haven’t been doing a lot of free writing really, just a small piece about dépanneurs (convenience stores) in Laval, where I grew up which is just in an early ember stage. I feel like writing my memoir helped me see that I need to start in embers, kernels in order to get my writing and thought process going but also how finishing a project can be important as a writer.

2 - How did you come to non-fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or fiction?

I did write some poetry growing up and in some English classes. I even got my poetry into a type of anthology in high school (I still have it even though it’s rather funny to read them now) but it’s hard for me to stake a claim as to be a poet. I often wrote stories as a child and I had a teacher Ms. Sauriol who let me read them aloud in class in fourth grade and they were silly things but it meant a lot to me for teachers like her to make space for me. I had many teachers who encouraged my writing even in high school where I did continue to write when I could. However, I eventually got very religious with the Jehovah’s Witnesses and put aside ambitions especially when it came to writing to the side. It was later in my late thirties, when I was slowly leaving the Witnesses that I came back into writing and for my birthday, I applied to the Humber School for Writers with a work of fiction that was really quite autobiographical and got some encouragement and hung out with a community that left me wanting more. I took a course at the University of Guelph that was an introduction to creative writing with Zoe Whittall and worked on a short piece of non-fiction that was called Leave-Taking and that ended up in the memoir. It wasn’t until I took non-fiction courses with Ayelet Tsabari that made me fall deep for non-fiction. This was after my friend Shelagh had highly recommended her. After that I just kept going because of Ayelet’s encouragement and guidance and the writers that came out of those classes and became part of my writer’s community. I also went to The Writer’s Studio and worked with Claudia Cornwall in the non-fiction co-hort and I got myself sorted out more to keep going with the story after feedback and workshops.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I am definitely a slow and percolating kind of writer. It can take years, years! Although, I don’t always know which ones will come to be an actual story. I do try to follow the energy of the piece and see if it will let me continue to write it. My first drafts normally do not resemble the final shape of the piece. They get dissected and removed and shuffled quite a bit before they’re ready to be a story. At times, the notes are inserted within the story so I can leave it as a placeholder until I have time to do more research, if I don’t go down that rabbit hole of research, that is.  

4 - Where does a work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I honestly never intentionally intended for my memoir to happen. I usually begin with a memory and then see where it takes me. Before I may have started with an idea or thought that appealed to me in fiction (so long ago and you know children’s brains). I did think it was possible to write a book before I knew about all the work a book would be. Then, I was unsure, really, as it can be kind of daunting but I decided to continue. Encouragement, community and advice from other writers did help me continue on, chapter by chapter, no matter what that looked like.  

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I do enjoy readings! I feel it is important to hear the writer read in their own voice and words that they wrote. That you can get the intention in which they wrote the words. It’s like the inside thoughts are the outside now. I also feel like it’s a way of connecting with each other. 

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

When I started, at times, I didn’t know what I was necessarily asking of myself as a writer so I just started writing. Later it became apparent that I was a searcher, a seeker, looking for answers. I believe it was Ayelet who said, as a writer we have a need to know (I may be paraphrasing here). So, the questions I am seeking or wondering about would be about belonging, my origins, who am I and what am I without the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who is my community, how to forgive, give grace to myself and others are among some of the questions or thoughts I am thinking about.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

Growing up in the Jehovah’s Witnesses, we had a very curated diet of information that was given to us. We were quite honestly to be separate from the world, so not to be influenced by the world or it’s affairs. Being no part of the world meant not being involved in its politics or worries as we were waiting on the coming of God’s Kingdom and that we were living in the last days so anything happening on the world scale, pestilence, war; these were signs that Armageddon was coming. I didn’t know to have much of an opinion about anything as I didn’t think I knew anything about anything and who was I anyway? My voice had been silenced for decades in many ways by silence in families like mine who were experiencing difficult lives at home, with parents who were dealing with mental health issues, alcoholism and a religion that maintains a shroud of secrecy around it. I do think it’s important to have a voice and to use it but I am still fearful in some ways. Worldly Girls is part of that, using my voice to speak up. I still have parts of me that are fearful of speaking up for myself or for anything. It is something I am working on to get better at. 

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

It may depend on the relationship I feel, the trust that happens between you. Once I’ve written my piece, I do find that working with someone outside of my process can be very helpful as they don’t know my writing or style or history and can bring a new perspective to the work. Something I’ve missed because I am filling in the gaps. I’ve always come away with something useful, that makes the work better. I know that without my amazing editor Stacey May Fowles Worldly Girls would not be what it became without her.   

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

The importance of first lines in a story, was great advice that I heard from Rachel Thompson who I took courses with online. It really stuck with me and made a difference in my work when submitting to literary magazines. It also helped with applying to anything writerly. I found the advice helped me slow down and think about where the reader was going to go.  

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (non-fiction to creative non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

It seemed to be very natural. There’s something about creative non-fiction that freed me to write in a way that just plain non-fiction couldn’t for me. It still has to be a story but it allows for if I may say, whimsical to appear. That’s what I’ve always enjoyed about creative non-fiction. It makes me think of Linda Trinh’s Seeking Spirit: A Vietnamese (Non) Buddhist Memoir and Emily Urquhart’s Ordinary Wonder Tales who do this so very well in their memoirs.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I don’t have a typical routine but of course I can’t wait for inspiration. I don’t write every day and at the moment, I am still doing writing related to Worldly Girls. I have that one story I’d like to get back to that I mentioned earlier on and I will. Normally, I’ll write in the evenings when I can, even if it’s just a line and do some reading or research and see if that adds to what I am thinking about. However, I do try to be open and be a work in progress when it comes to what works.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I find that reading helps me or watching a movie or program. If it’s stalled, either I am feeling a resistance to what comes next or I need more information to go ahead. I find that usually helps me step away and then come back to it. I have had writing I have started that I scrapped. Sometimes, I will take some of the old lines or thoughts and borrow them for a new story. I don’t think it’s wasted really. I needed to get stalled in order to figure it out.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

There’s something about the smell of summer. I used to say to my sister,”This is going to be the best summer ever! And she’d say, “You always say that,” and laugh. When I smell summer which may be the hot sun on the dry grass or the morning after the dew forms on the grass, or the chlorine from a pool (a fave childhood memory), that reminds me of home in Chomedey, Quebec where I grew up.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Maybe some writers can write in silence but not me. I like to have music around or put tv shows on, listen to podcasts or movies. I’ve done many re-writes and edits with background noise on. I’ve also been influenced by reading graphic novels and comics. I was into many of the superheros like Spider Man and Superman growing up and more recently Teresa Wong’s All Our Ordinary Stories and Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls. Also kid’s books have been such a way to tell a story in such short and impactful ways. I think of Kyo Maclear’s Spork and Leonarda Carranza’s Abuelita and Me.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Wow, great questions. Oh, I have so many writers that have shaped my work and are meaningful for me and the list grows and grows! There was Lucy Maud Montgomery, Jane Austen, The Brontës, earlier on. Then Alexander Chee, Mary Johnson, Mary Karr, Jan Wong, Ayelet Tsabari, Zoe Whittall, Claudia Cornwall, Teresa Wong, Kyo Maclear, Lina Lau, Emily McKibbon, Leonarda Carranza, Doretta Lau, Nicole Breit, Logan Broeckaert, Jagtar Atwal, Laura Sky, Preeti Kaur Dhaliwal, Hege Lepri, Obim Okongwu, Yilin Wang, Phoebe Wang, Leanne Dunic, Catherine Lewis, Susan Scott, Melissa Febos, Carrianne Leung, Jen Sookfong-Lee, Annahid Dashtgard, Hollay Ghadery, Stacey May Fowles, Emily Urquhart, Sarah Minor, Wayson Choy, and Chelene Knight come to mind right off. This list is constantly growing.    

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I would love to go to Hong Kong. I’ve heard so many good things about the food and culture there. Some of my family hails from there too, so would love to visit places and learn more.

I would also love to learn Mandarin more fluently. I am currently trying to learn with a very patient teacher and I am terrible but I so enjoy our time together. 

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

In another life, I would have loved to play professional soccer. I also tried hockey but hey I was terrible, haha. So, because of my religious devotion with the Jehovah’s Witnesses and also the times I grew up, there wasn’t a time or place for me to pursue sports back then. I came to soccer later in life like my thirties after leaving the Witnesses and loved it so much. It was being part of a team, winning and losing together and that my contributions did matter. I learned a lot about myself and it gave me confidence. I also gained new friendships I would have never had. 

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I did feel like it chose me again and again and I kept coming back to it no matter what. 

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

The Unravelling of Ou by Hollay Ghadery. It knocked both my socks (hehe) off. I am hoping to get some more free time by summer to read more great books.

I haven’t seen any really great films lately. I saw Wuthering Heights but ‘nuff said. Nice costumes and scenery?

20 - What are you currently working on?

I am just enjoying having finished Worldly Girls right now. I had three essays that were left out of this memoir so I will get back to these essays which contain my search for my father’s story about his being a “paper son” from China and see where that goes. I have to do way more research and find out as much information as I can and hoping for more clarity. It also requires ruminating so I won’t set a specific timeline on how to get it going.  I will also get back to some children’s book ideas I had been working on before getting Worldly Girls into the world.   

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

chaun webster, Without Terminus

i am the grandchild and great grandchild of rail workers. both of them porters of the sleeping car, both of them having demands placed up their bodies that interdicted their rest. during their employment they were both suspended in the irony of the sleeping car, which stole their ability to sleep, that robbery of rest a down payment for the ease of white train passengers. it is a familiar formula. i am trying to extend the sentences that arrived to me from my mother, and later the railroad’s archive, extend them into a different kind of exhaustion and limit point, to see where their lines fracture and whether ii can step into the space made by their splitting. i am attempting to insert the curvature of the comma into the sentence and line, a speculative practice emerging from a desire to converse with ghosts.

I’m deeply impressed by American poet chaun webster’s debut work of nonfiction, the remarkable Without Terminus (Minneapolis MN: Graywolf Press, 2026), a book that follows on the heels of the author’s two Minnesota Book Award-winning poetry titles—GeNtry!fication: or the scene of the crime (Noemi Press, 2018) and Wail Song: wading in the water at the end of the world (Black Ocean, 2023)—both of which I’m a bit frustrated at not having seen. As the back cover offers: “chaun webster traces how anti-Black violence has shaped his inheritance. He begins with his grandfather Reginald, a Pullman porter who was denied rest and a pension, and follows Reginald and the train into a gloriously wayward exploration of comportment and confinement, the ancestral meeting place of dreams, and his relationships with his mother and child. Pushing sentences to their limits and troubling the grammar of anti-Blackness, webster riffs and rails on the debris within reach.”

It is interesting how webster articulates and utilizes the archive, history and family history in a way comparable to the work of American poet Susan Howe [see my piece on Howe's latest here]: offering narrative threads and extended sequences, layerings of visual collage and an otherwise poetic structure. As well, this is a title that connects directly (inadvertently, I’m sure) to Calgary writer Suzette Mayr, through her award-winning novel The Sleeping Car Porter (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2022). Through Mayr’s fiction, she writes of R.T. Baxter, a Queer, Black man in 1929 working as a sleeping car porter on a train that moves across Canada, including the prairie provinces. webster’s narrative writes of a maternal grandfather known predominantly through family story and the archive, who also worked as a sleeping car porter, across the American Midwest, based in Saint Paul, Minnesota. “a mass of stories get imposed on experience, on the archive,” webster writes, early on in the collection, “comporting its materials to its shape, becoming the less by which not only the events and sequence of the past are determined but also their meaning. you are a student of story: a familiar one is that of uplift through adversity, that those who work and toil do so with the eventuality of ascendancy.”

This reads as a reclamation project, working through the archive, whether newspaper or family story or other records, to discover the possibilities of what otherwise the author can’t access. This is not the archival process of a poet such as Edmonton-based Jordan Abel [see my essay on Abel here], attempting to access the touchstone of an absent father and, thus, a distance from a particular culture and foundation, but one in which webster seeks, quite directly, the touchstone of an ancestor known only through these stories, one that can only be better known, at this point, through this piecemeal process of abstraction, unverifiable stories and unstoried facts. As webster writes:

you cannot bring together the complex material of your grandfather’s life through story, something is always erased from the surface when you attempt to constrict the dimensions of his living with that of a scene or chapter that takes place in the forty-two-inch-by-twenty-five-inch sleeping car and is reproduced on this five-and-a-half-by-eight-and-a-quarter page. even the one hundred twenty pages from Reginald’s employment files, which you have purchased photocopies of from the National Archives in Atlanta, are compressed, comport less to a life than to its abbreviation.

As webster works to write a way through the archival facts and family stories into something known, possible and tangible, Without Terminus offers the structure and cadence of a long poem through prose narrative, the strength of such a project compounded through the layerings of narrative structures. Through researching the grand elements of history and archive, webster seeks the intimacy of their grandfather.

your mother tells you a story about retirement, your grandfather’s twenty-five years of service as a pullman porter. every time you say the title you feel the word pull stretching itself out in your mouth, a pulllllllllman porter. she told you of the constraints of his labor, its years, and how they pulled from him, pulled years from him, how he would retire without pension and then would die with no triumphant ballad, your mother is the inaugural archive, your point of origin for what you come to know about your grandfather, archive here being a slippery word, one that could indicate a physical geography where the collected materials of history have been stored or something more ephemeral, a body of knowledge, the archive of material experience, both are full of elisions and gaps, you step into them.

 

Monroe Lawrence, Gravity Siren

My review of Vancouver Island-born Colorado-based poet Monroe Lawrence's Gravity Siren (Brooklyn NY: Beautiful Days Press, 2026) is now online at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics. Catch my review of their full-length debut, About to Be Young (The Elephants, 2021) here, or my interview earlier this year with them over at Touch the Donkey.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jide Salawu

Jide Salawu is a Canadian-Nigerian writer. He is the author of Preface for Leaving Homeland, published under the African Poetry Book Fund, and the co-editor of African Urban Echoes, published by Griots Lounge Canada, and Contraband Bodies, published by NeWest Press and Narrative Landscape. He is currently a Black postdoctoral scholar in the Department of English at Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, Ontario. 

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Thank you, rob. My first book, Preface for Leaving Homeland, was published in 2019. I had received an invitation from the African Poetry Book Fund for their chapbook series, headed by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani. The series has become a new cultural venue and has already produced new-generation African literary stars such as Gbenga Adesina, Gbenga Adeoba, Afua Ansong, Adedayo Agarau, Nour Kamel, Leila Chatti, Rasaq Malik Gbolahan, Momtaza Mehri, among others. So, as I was saying, I was nominated to submit to the boxset series. Before then, I had written individual poems addressing a variety of subjects. But my first sustained work that explores the precarity of mobility in Africa and beyond would be the chapbook. The overwhelming experiences of African migrants moving through trans-Saharan and Mediterranean routes become daunting archives that will inform most of the poems. In Contraband Bodies, I was thinking about African migrant within Africa as a racialized figure; this includes the xenophobic rage in South Africa now; I was thinking about migration from below and what I mean by that is rural/urban migration; I was thinking about my private memories as a Black African migrant moving across different diasporic spaces, including Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and within Africa. But I don’t own these memories alone. I have described Contraband Bodies as a personal record—I think this work imbricates other public experiences of the Black diaspora.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

It is a personal story that I am always glad to credit to my grandfather, who I would call a Yoruba poet, for his skill of oriki, a genre of oral poetry in Yoruba culture. He introduced me to the gift of literature and the sublimity of the Yoruba language. Yoruba is a highly tonal language, and quite musical. This does not mean all Yoruba people are poets, but the language is the first linguistic resource point for someone interested in literary culture. From that background, we can pick one or two things about my growth as a young writer. As a student, even when I was interested in poetry, and I had read literary greats such as David Rubadiri, Oswald Mtshali, Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo, Kofi Awoonor, Jared Angira, I didn’t know how to begin writing. In 2005, Gabriel Arishe, a teacher in my secondary school in Shao, who had taken it as a duty to mentor me in English grammar, told me I could also write poetry. I thought I needed some celestial power to do so. That day ended with me writing a poem I titled, “Moonlight Days.” I wish I still had that scrap of paper on which I wrote the first poem.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I don’t know the best answer to this, rob. But my writing process is very chaotic. I am not very organized, and I won’t recommend my model to anyone. My writing is very slow and scrappy at first. Many of my works, including creative non-fiction, don’t make it out and end up in the trash bags. I may have an idea to work on and gestate for a long time; bit by bit, the lines may appear. Maybe one or two of my poems came perfectly shaped. The others are through a series of revisions, and the editorial infrastructure I have built through friendship and mentorship.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

A poem can begin in any way from random things: a scene by the roadside, a conversation with a friend, a walk in the bush, your annoyance with a TV show, or an event going on locally or globally. Inspirations can come in different ways, including dreams.  I think when I started writing Contraband Bodies, I just wanted to reimagine out-of-placeness in another way, especially for the African on the move. I wrote a number of poems that Elee Kraljii Gardiner worked on during my Yosef Wosk Fellowship, but it was she also who told me, you have a powerful collection in view. Then I wrote a bit more and went through a series of revisions before I had my first full-length.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I think from my little understanding, community is everything. It is what poetry, like any other artistic form, thrives on.  Public readings are a great chance to talk more about your work and connect with your audience. I do not think they are counter-creative. I think even in reading, there is a chance to open your work up to a conversation you might not have imagined, prompting you to see its weaknesses and strengths.  I am grateful for all the invitations to read Contraband Bodies since its publication.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

Quite a poignant one there, rob. Truly, I just want to write first, but my writings generally are concerned with social change, and raise more questions about the atrocities rather than providing answers; I want to escalate concerns about abuse of human rights, and dehumanization of Black African migrants across micro-macro spaces, including the low mumble of racialization of African migrants within Africa. I want to explore the conditions of Nigeria’s nationhood, and so many things that postcolonial failures in Africa can evoke. I think this is not to say that my work reveals nothing, but I do not want to pre-empt my readers or lovers of my writing. I can only hope that when they embark on the readerly journey of my work, they find moments that are striking, that subvert hegemonic tales, and that absorb them emotionally. I want to meet my readers, and ask, so my poetry does that too. Oh, I never knew!

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

Arts, as you know, can be perverted. Arts have been in the service of oppression. rob, let me tell you about what is going on in the case of Nigeria. The politicians, after their tenure, are writing hagiographies (life-writings of sorts), and they are getting reviewed by professors who praise them. In the books, they glorify themselves and talk about their good deeds for the masses. That is how terrible it is. Globally, too, you know, there are writers who side with horrendous leadership and even justify their need for the governance. Writings were first used to service colonialism itself; I recall now Achebe’s “The Image of Africa” where he is in dialogue with Joseph Conrad. I think as a writer, I want to reject grand narratives. Speaking against tyranny and oppressive structures has been a whole duty, and this is my pure sentiment given my own background, appearance at the margin, as a person from a country like Nigeria. Tell the counter-story.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I think editors need to be acknowledged more for the powerful work they do in the replenishing ritual of the manuscript. It is vital to work with an editor. This is a peer-review process that allows one to see some of the blindspots in one’s work as a writer. I was able to publish Contraband Bodies, for example, because of the wonderful work of Jennifer Bowering at NeWest, and my Nigerian editor, Joy Chime, at Narrative Landscape. Thanks to many friends, too, including Hussain Ahmed, Ifeoluwa Adeniyi, and Jumoke Verissimo, who read the manuscript.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Write and wait for the loads of rejection. It is not exactly how Wole Soyinka put it in an interview I watched. But don’t think rejections won’t come. They will, and so many great writers, have those in them inbox. You remember the New Yorker's rejection letter to Gabriel García Márquez on July 15, 1989, for his story “The Trail of Your Blood on the Snow.” This is a common thing in academia, though. We should not just be discouraged by them. For Contraband Bodies, I got many rejections from presses in Canada and beyond. Thank you to NeWest and Narrative Landscape for their faith.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

With a bottle of water spiced up with lemon. That will be followed by a cup of coffee. I want it Black too. No writing routine, especially for my literary work. I just write when the impulse grips me to do so. Sometimes it is morning; other times it is in the afternoon. I do writing where it meets me–jot on my phone, scrap of paper, email drafts, inside the bus, and so on. This is not the same for academic writing, which is more methodical and demands some linearity in planning and scheduling.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

See films/documentaries. Explore Edmonton. Chat and gossip with my partner. Read more. 

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Foods! As a Yoruba man, Amala precisely. I have tried to reenact the memories of home through the diasporic foodways, but you know, it can’t be the same. Have you tried Nigerian jollof, rob? There is a great war going on in West Africa between Nigeria and Ghana now about who cooks the best Jollof. Nigeria, of course.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Yes, rob. Music, science, visual arts, sculpture, farming, travels, and even reading other people's work influence my writings. Take, for example, my poem “Akiwowo” from Contraband Bodies, which was influenced by the music of Grammy winner Babatunde Olatunji, also titled “Akiwowo.”

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

As a critic, I admire many theorists and scholars. While I can’t say this set is my favorite, a number of writings influence my scholarship/critical writings, Frantz Fanon, Jacques Derrida, Achille Mbembe, Edward Said, Chigbo Anyaduba, Mahmood Mamdani, Akin Adesokan, Evan Mwangi, Carli Coetzee, Rinaldo Walcott, and so on. I have been mentored by many writers, scholars, and theorists whom I haven’t met. See, I can’t exhaust this list. Outside my work, I would say When Air Becomes Breath by Paul Kalanithi. It is a devastating one.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I like traveling, and I would like to see many great places I have read about in literature. Although, as you know, writers are always broke. Did you read this recent symposium piece by The Baffler, “The Profession That Does Not Exist”?

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

Maybe a farmer. I still love farming. Back in the days, in my hometown Shao, I helped my father a lot with weeding guinea corn fields, yam fields, corn fields, and acres of cassava fields. 

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I think as a literature student, reading writings by writers across cultures and societies makes me fall in love with writing as a creative process. The sublimating power of writing does it for me. There may be other talents I have not explored yet. But let me use this opportunity to recommend our film documentary project, on which I am an associate producer, Ebrohimie Road. It is a film on the African Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, directed by my friend Kola Tubosun.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Salvage: Readings from the Wreck is a wonderful work; Its style is distinct and distilled. I am now reading One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad. Film, haha, I would say, Mati Diop’s The Atlantique. Mati’s film may be considered a bit old now, but the poetry of the film makes it transcendental as a cinematic masterpiece that explores class and mobility. But there are so many great films out there that I have not been able to watch. People have talked a lot about Sinners, but I have not had time for it. I should do this in the summer! There is also My Father’s Shadow. My list of films is long o.

19 - What are you currently working on?

Now, I am working on an anthology project that explores winter experience and the Afro-Canadian diaspora. This will be published by Wilfried Laurier U Press in 2027. The call is out.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;