At the end of last year, Daniel stayed with us at our NYC hub as part of Dear Reader. After his visit, he was kind enough to field some questions.
Ace: Published earlier this year, Shadowshaper has been heralded as a magnificent Young Adult novel. YA is a vibrant genre teeming possibilities — what drew you to it? How do you feel about Young Adult novels and their place in our culture?
In Shadowshaper the language you use is layered and rich. Your use of vernacular brings an energy and uniqueness to the story, to its characters and the culture/community they belong to. How do you approach vernacular and diction, and how important an element is this to your storytelling?
The vernacular is very important to me, because I draw as much inspiration from conversations on the street and with friends as I do from literature itself. I aim for a what I call the poetic vernacular — which is really just a way of recognizing that there is so much poetry in the casual way we speak to each other. So I made a point of including that in my writing style, not just in the characters' voices but in the narration, in part to say: there is no neutral, there is no correct, no one way to speak. These lines are very blurry, and they should be.
While Shadowshaper’s protagonist is Sierra, the community as a whole seems to be the hero of the story. Was this a thematically important decision to you and/or a means of avoiding the One and Only/Chosen One scenarios you warn against in your Buzzfeed article?
Definitely — in a sense, the antagonist's fatal flaw is how tightly he grips to the One and Only motif — he latches on to that line, the mere mention of Oneness in the shadowshaper mythos, and it's a deep misunderstanding: what to him means all power concentrated in one figure, to everyone else means oneness amidst a multitude, togetherness — which is really another way of saying community. So yeah — I wanted to show community in action and keep it front and center, particularly in a story about not just falling back on easy tropes.
The same article outlines your "12 Fundamentals Of Writing 'The Other' (And The Self)." Aside from the obvious one of writing a female protagonist in Shadowshapers, what are some of the biggest narrative challenges you have taken on as a writer?
I think it's always important, as writers, to challenge our own privileges. For me, that's meant understanding how my cis-ness, my maleness and straightness and, my class privilege and my non-Blackness all inform my view/experience of the world and how that in turn informs the stories I write, the characters I create, and the way I move through the publishing world. That has to be a very honest, difficult conversation, both with myself and with the people around me, and it requires listening and soul-searching. It's not easy; it shouldn't be easy. And it's so much deeper than simply "Research" or "Do your homework" which is where a lot of conversations about writing the other begin and end.
Along with your decade-long career as a paramedic, you are a renowned musician and your band Ghost Star performs regularly throughout the city. What is the interplay between these careers/passions and your work as a writer?
Playing and composing music has taught me to pay attention to a lot of the more musical elements of prose I wouldn't have necessarily picked up on otherwise: Rhythm, flow, silence, gravity, tension and resolution - these are all concepts that play out on the page and in my mind as I write, and I often think of paragraphs and entire sections as music, landing back on the one or in some unresolved way that pushes the reader into the next part.
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Chinelo Okparanta’s voice comes with a fresh boldness and vulnerability that make her work unforgettable. Her worlds are vivid, her emotions are true and her debut novel Under the Udala Trees was just released to a lovefest.
Chinelo stayed over at our New York hub as a participant in our Dear Reader residency. After her sojourn, she was kind enough to let us ask some questions about her work:Â
Your fiction feels deeply true, and at times seems to lend comparison to your own biography. How do you navigate between your personal experiences and those of your female protagonists? What parts of your own story do you feel compelled to share?
CO: My fiction is exactly that — fictional. Sometimes, of course, the fiction is inspired by bits of reality. But what the reader guesses is the reality quite often is the fiction. When I wrote "Runs Girl" several people made assumptions that I had worked as a Runs Girl, that is, as a high class escort. One person even went as far as to put it up online. At a reading I did in Kansas, a woman came up to me, telling me how brave I was for writing that story. It seemed to her that surely I must have lived and breathed those experiences to have been able to write that story. It seemed to her that I must have watched my mother fall sick in that way, that I must have been essentially raped by a wealthy oil executive, that I must have watched my mother die from that unexplainable illness.
In fact, there's a thin line between truth and fiction, or at least there can be. By that I mean that my mother has suffered some illnesses throughout her life, and were any of them to have been life threatening, and were I to have been put in the same position as my protagonist--that is to say, if working as an escort were to be my only chance at saving my mother's life--then the fiction would essentially be the reality, because surely I would do exactly the same as my protagonist. Effectively, I would be my protagonist.Â
But the story remains fiction. I have never worked as an escort. My mother is in fact still living. As is my father. I have been at the University of Port Harcourt Teaching Hospital many times in my life, and have witnessed first-hand the power outages, etc. But "Runs Girl" is a fictional story. When I write, I like to write from an intimate space, from a place that feels true. I deeply inhabit my characters so that, in a sense, their sufferings become my own. Their joys, also my own. This is what it is to be a reader — this willingness to deeply inhabit someone else's reality, to empathize with their pain and suffering. This is also what it means to be a writer: to be so willing to inhabit the world of the fiction so deeply, so empathetically, that the world of the fiction effectively becomes your own.
For whatever it's worth, for a while, I did own a wrap-around red dress, like the one described in "Runs Girl." But no, never been a Runs Girl.
In your story "Runs Girl" you employ first person to tell Ada's tale, while in "Contamination," you take on a close third person narration. Both you do so well. What considerations do you take into account when choosing a POV?
I didn't think too much about POV when writing those particular stories. I simply listened to the stories that were begging to come out, and I told them in the POV in which they presented themselves. But in general, I find that it's always a good idea to write in the POV that allows the story to feel the most urgent, the most immediate, the most true, that is, the POV that best serves the purpose of the story.
You said in a past interview that you were "not very good at writing novels yet." Your first novel was just released and has received wide praise. What did it take to get over that "yet" hurdle?
Perseverance.
In March of this year you traveled home to Nigeria to receive the Etisalat Prize for Literature. What was this experience like?
It was a fine experience. I was there immediately before the elections. Fortunately, the elections were rather peaceful this year, so aside from flyers and banners and bulletin boards promising the rich even more money for their votes, asking them to place bets (Bet For Your Presidential Candidate and Win 100% Profit; Bet 1 million Naira, Win 2 Million), things were rather fine. I got lots of support from Etisalat, as well as from the lovely people at Terra Kulture, Beat FM and Smooth FM. The internet trolls who took offense at my Gloria and Nnenna lesbian stories did not in fact follow through with their threats. I returned unscathed.
Whether it's a country, a coffee shop or a state of mind, where do you go when you want to write?
Catherine Chung is a fearless voice that’s making moves on the fiction scene. Her first novel, Forgotten Country was released in 2012 to boundless celebration. She’s Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Adelphi University, a visitor in the Interdisciplinary Studies Program at the the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton — all while publishing non- and fiction. Last month, Catherine stayed over at our NYC base as part of our Dear Reader series.Â
After her stay, she was kind enough to let us ask her some questions and we're delighted to share her answers:
Travel and fantasy are two means of escape that you write about. You've also discussed your desire to "embrace the things I am". Â How do you make sense of these two seemingly contradictory but entirely related desires: to escape and to embrace?
CC: I see travel and fantasy as more a means to explore than a means of escape--and that goes with writing as well. They are all ways to engage the imagination, and to explore different, unknown sides of yourself, which awaken when you're exposed to new experiences, places, and ideas. These things can help you push past the familiar self and world that you know, and beyond the constraints of old or unconsidered patterns of thought and behavior, to embrace possibility and potential, and the things you don't yet know—to embrace, I guess, an expanding version of your self and the world.
You write well about the concept of giving the outsider/other a voice in the midst of isolation. Conversations surrounding this feel particularly germane in U.S. culture right now. How do you bring consciousness and freshness to the conversation?
It's interesting that you bring this up, because the way this question is formulated presupposes several things I don't at all agree with, and I think that often this fundamental disagreement over setting the terms of a discussion can be part of what makes it so difficult to have the conversation. So to start, I don't consider myself "the outsider" or "the other," nor do I agree with applying that category to real people, and I reject the notion that by writing or expressing my own opinions or describing my own experiences, that I am taking on some representative power to speak for that amorphous mass we call "the other."
To reduce someone to a symbol or an idea (which is what we do when we call them "the other") is to deny their capacity to be complex and surprising (and human!)—and to ignore the fact that all of us are much more than just our categorizations. This is why it can be so damaging and destructive to have that vision of yourself as "the other" continually forced upon you, or to habitually see another person (or an entire group of people) that way. It's just incredibly alienating. What I try to do, what is most interesting for me to do, is to use my voice and mind to engage in honest conversation with other voices and minds, and to really try to listen and be receptive. Because when you actually listen, it makes it possible to break down the notion that anyone is "the other," which I think is just a way of constructing a barrier between your mind and someone else's. Sometimes we consider another person "isolated" but we are the ones who have created that isolation—not just between ourselves and that person, but within ourselves.
How did your experience working at a think tank like RAND inform your writing process?
I loved working at RAND. I was just out of college when I went there, so I had no idea how lucky I was—but basically I was surrounded by interesting, intelligent, and generous people, who spent their time thinking about all sorts of different things—like specific ways to improve education, healthcare disparities, foreign policy, etc... and it was incredibly good for training my mind to look at data, to connect evidence with bigger picture ideas, to question myself and to become comfortable with being questioned--all good things for a writer to learn.
Mathematics and Literature are two of your loves, so we’ve got to know: Infinite set or Infinite Jest?
Location: Ace Hotel New York
Date of Stay: 09/08/15
Artist:Â Andrew Jeffrey Wright
The First Letter of My First Name 45 Times is perhaps the most accurately titled work the Ace AIR program has seen, and was created in room 325 one night by Artist in Residence Andrew Jeffery Wright. In addition, Wright left a bunch of hand drawn stickers in our guest book and invited a crew of pals over for some quality photobooth time.
Andrew Jeffrey Wright is a founding member of Philadelphia's Space 1026 art collective. He has a BFA in Animation and his collaborative animated film with Clare Rojas, the Manipulators, has won top prize in several film festivals. His works include painting, animation, drawing, collage, photography, sculpture, video, installation, screen printing and performance. Wright’s images have appeared in publications by McSweeney’s, Kramers Ergot, and on the cover of Tokion’s Revisionaries book. NYC, LA, San Francisco, Tokyo and Philadelphia are a few of the cities where he has had solo exhibitions. Wright's highly limited edition zines, which combine screen prints and photocopies, have gained an international following.
This September, our bonus artists have been curated by Printed Matter, the non-profit organization dedicated to the dissemination, understanding and appreciation of artists’ books. Printed Matter maintains an expansive inventory of over 37877 titles from more than 27080 artists, and produces both the New York Art Book Fair and LA Art Book Fair. We’re honored to have them curating #AceAIR in celebration of the 10th annual New York Art Book Fair, taking place September 18-20 at MoMA PS1.
Location: Ace Hotel New York
Date of Stay: 09/07/15
Artist: Tamara Santibañez
Tamara Santibañez spent a night in Ace NYC room 507 and produced a series of Polaroid photos — both as final works, and to document temporary site-specific fabric-based installations.
Santibañez is a multimedia artist living and working in Brooklyn. Raised in Georgia, she relocated to New York at a young age and has made the city her home for the past ten years. She combines a full time tattoo practice, traveling often and working at the legendary Saved Tattoo in Brooklyn, with a varied fine art practice that includes drawing, printmaking and painting. Santibañez has collaborated with numerous artists, publications, and brands such as the Material Lust, Laurie Simmons, David D'Andrea, Frank 151, Diesel, Pacific Dissent, and All Day Everyday. Santibañez is also a regular contributor to Sang Bleu magazine. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, with an upcoming solo show at Sang Bleu London in the fall of 2015. Her recent work explores the weight that materials and objects can hold as symbols, drawing influence from her subcultural affiliations and presenting images from the worlds of punk, heavy metal, tattooing, and BDSM to the audience at large.
This September, our bonus artists have been curated by Printed Matter, the non-profit organization dedicated to the dissemination, understanding and appreciation of artists’ books. Printed Matter maintains an expansive inventory of over 37877 titles from more than 27080 artists, and produces both the New York Art Book Fair and LA Art Book Fair. We’re honored to have them curating #AceAIR in celebration of the 10th annual New York Art Book Fair, taking place September 18-20 at MoMA PS1.
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Program: AIR
Location: Ace Hotel New York
Date of Stay: 09/06/15
Artist: AUNTS with Ventiko, Gilf!, Karl Scholz, Tara Aisha Willis, and Adams Stark
An AUNTS sleepover is like those of childhood. Less sleeping, more fort-building, mirror-marking, costume-designing, face-painting, conversing, myth and magic. There is a lot of freedom, which makes the whole thing a bit odd to try and document, but we’ve done our best.
On their inaugural evening, many friends joined AUNTS. Street artist gilf!, one of NYC’s most recognized conceptual / activist artists. Ventiko is a photographic artist whose works focus on the (re)construction of moments, not in time but in thought, to express social positions on sexuality, persona and the state of the modern woman. Tara Aisha Willis’s choreography has been shown at Movement Research at the Judson Church, BAX, Roulette, THROW, Dixon Place, The Painting Center, and in partnership with Adams Stark. Karl Scholz, an AUNTS regular, makes work in software, sound, video, and fiber arts — investigating the creation of ephemeral systems to augment environments for performance.
AUNTS, curators of Ace AIR this September, was founded by James Kidd and Rebecca Brooks in 2005 and is currently organized by Laurie Berg and Liliana Dirks-Goodman. Guided by core principles of collectivity, cooperation, and sharing, AUNTS generates a constantly shifting environment where artists negotiate the simultaneous production and/or presentation of their work in relationship to one another. Often taking the form of a live event, AUNTS allows audiences to freely move about the spaces it inhabits, choosing their own path and creating their own experiences through chance encounters.
Location: Ace Hotel New York
Date of Stay: 08/30/15
Artist: Hannah Giorgis
Hannah Giorgis spent the night at Ace Hotel New York as an Artist in Residence, putting ink to paper, creating a beautiful, abridged family history. Â
Giorgis is a writer and organizer whose work addresses the intersections of race, gender, immigration, class, and mass culture. Born in Southern California, she is the daughter of Ethiopian & Eritrean immigrants. Hannah is a contributing writer for The Guardian's US opinion section, and her work has also appeared in BuzzFeed, Pitchfork, Okayafrica, Quartz, MTV IGGY, The Hairpin, and the forthcoming Feminist Utopia Project, among others.
This August, our Artists in Residence have been curated by Oyster, a great way to read on a smartphone or tablet. Oyster allows folks to discover new books, download them and even read them offline, say if you’re tunnel bound and so on.
Program: AIR
Location: Ace Hotel New York
Date of Stay: 08/23/15
Artist: Durga Chew-Bose
Spending the night at Ace Hotel New York can be an e·mo·tion·al experience, as exemplified by Artist in Residence Durga Chew-Bose who, this past Sunday listened exclusively to the latest effort from Carly Rae Jepsen. Over the course of repeated listens, Chew-Bose created Twenty Five on CRJ, a list of 25 album-inspired notes which you can read as a PDF.
Durga Chew-Bose is a writer living in Crown Heights. Her essays have appeared on The Hairpin, Hazlitt, and Buzzfeed, She has also contributed to The Guardian.com, Grantland, Adult, and The New Inquiry.
This August, our Artists in Residence have been curated by Oyster, one of our favorite ways to read on a smartphone or tablet. Oyster allows folks to discover new books, download them and even read them offline, say if you’re tunnel bound and so on.
