An Interview with June Tonsé Short Story Book Club Author Dennis Mugaa
Our June BookClub choice, Nairuko, links to read for free and an interview.
This month’s Tonsé Short Story Book Club choice “Nairuko” has just been announced as one of 2023 Years Best African Speculative Fiction. That means it’ll be published in the YBASF Anthology which will be eligible for a 2024 British Fantasy Award. Very exciting.
You can check out the full list here and if you scrawl further down you may also notice another familiar name among the YBASF 2023 Recommended Reading List; my short story Stolen Memories as published in Omenana Speculative Fiction Magazine last year.
I spoke to Dennis before this announcement - about his writing style and motivation as well as the origin of Nairuko. I love how he lets his stories just be.
There’s still time to read or listen to the story free at Fantasy Magazine here. We meet online to discuss it this Sunday 23rd June at 16:00CAT.
Here’s our conversation.
Your writing has a lightness of touch. It flickers across the page, dreamlike. You’ve spoken in the past about how long it can take to complete a story. It seems to me there’s a lot of daydreaming between the writing. How do you tend to spend that non-writing, writing time? What are some activities that trigger the return to the page?
Thank you for the kind words Mwanabibi. It is something that whenever I do have the time, I always try to make my writing have the quality go floating of the page. If for instance I am working on something, I do spend a considerable amount of time away from it. I mean away from it in the sense that I do not write the short story or the essay in one sitting. In the time that I am away from it, I still do carry it with me. I consider all the possibilities that the story could go in so that it can arrive to a point where it feels the most authentic. My return to the page is often always triggered by something else I may have read which unlocks something in my mind in what I would like to do with my writing or with a particular piece of prose.
You describe yourself as writing about time and memory. Another overarching theme is movement. The transitory nature of human existence, not just in the abstract but in the physical sense as well. Many of your stories include migrants. What draws you to these travellers?
Thank you once again for noticing that. I’m not sure my attraction to migrants is deliberate, but I will say that it is definitely something subconscious. From a story angle, if a character is new to a certain place, it gives rise to so many different possibilities of what could happen to them, this is in itself a conflict to the internal self. A previous life that one has been used to and a new life that the person has been thrust to.
Your upcoming collection Half Portraits Under Water is a series of interlocked stories exploring love and grief. Did you conceive of it as a collection to begin with or was the process more fluid? What do you feel evoked the mood of the collection and allowed it to remain cohesive?
No, I didn’t have the collection mapped out from the start before writing the first short story in it. What I did come to realise is that after I had written about four or five stories, some characters would appear in some stories and then they would not appear in others. Later on, when I had about eight stories, I realised that if I ordered them lovely across time, they seemed to form a uniform narrative which could hold a collection. I wouldn’t say there is a particular mood in the collection, but I do feel that they wonderfully mesh into each other in a way that it may appear when read that one story cannot exist without the other. In the middle of my writing of the collection, I read David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. Six novellas which features the same reincarnated soul in different eras as different people each with their own story. The book despite the different styles used to tell each story and the eras lived, feels like a well-arranged symphony, perhaps this is what I hope my collection achieves. I’m not entirely sure I can say what my collection is about. I recently read Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s “The Most Secret Memory of Men”, and one of the characters in it warns, “only a mediocre or bad or ordinary book is about something.” Perhaps because of this, I’m glad I can’t adequately explain what it is about without resorting to the themes individual stories appear to explore.
You have a number of accolades under your belt. The winner of the 2022 Black Warrior Review Prize for Fiction, shortlisted for the Isele Prize, longlisted for the Afritondo Short Story Prize, and a Miles Morland Foundation Scholar. Writers are often thought of flighty creatives. Can you dispel this myth? How much of what you achieve is by design, how do you strategise the trajectory of your writing career? Related to this, what do you see as the goal of your writing?
I’m not sure that a writer can plan on winning certain prizes as the awarding of those prizes depends entirely on someone else’s subjectivity. But I do think if one works hard one can write well, and when something is well written, sometimes there’s no limit as to where it can reach. Therefore, my goal with my writing is to simply write well. To write each sentence as well as I can.
Your writing is often rooted in realism, but Nairuko explores an alternate reality. How does conceptualising this kind of story impact your creative process?
Nairuko was sparked by a conversation I had with a writer friend of mine who told me about a Maa community who had been genocided by the British and for whom no record of their existence remains apart from oral sources. I think with this starting point it is easy to see an alternate reality on where a few of those people survive that genocide. For me then it was a question of what would happen to such people, how would they think of the world, how would their descendants think of the world a hundred years after the genocide. And what would those people think about their place in the world say if some of them could teleport.
You strike me as an avid reader. It’s all over so much of your work. You’re currently working on a new novel, what does it have you seeking out to read?
Thank you once more. I do try to read as much as I can. And yes, I am working on a novel which is currently titled Other Time, Other Life. I’m not sure the novel informs what I do read, except if I have to read something for research. I read things that interest me at that particular time, but in the last few months, I have been drawn to so much non-fiction. A recent excellent essay I read was by Aminatta Forna titled, 1979, about her time in Iran during the fall of the Shah of Iran and the Ayatollah taking over.
Dennis Mugaa is a Kenyan writer and editor. His debut short story collection, Half Portraits Under Water, is forthcoming with Masobe Books.
Here’s this year’s full list if you’d like to read ahead.