The Anythingness of the Speculative Space: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah on Perspective, Nuance, and Keeping Yourself Surprised

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is the New York Times-bestselling author of Friday Black. Originally from Spring Valley, New York, he graduated from SUNY Albany and went on to receive his MFA from Syracuse University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming from numerous publications, including the New York Times Book Review, Esquire, Literary Hub, the Paris Review, Guernica, and Longreads. He was selected by Colson Whitehead as one of the National Book Foundation's “5 Under 35” honorees, is the winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Award for Best First Book and the Aspen Words Literary Prize.

On April 13, 2022, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah joined The Interlochen Review editors Neva Ensminger-Holland, Nicholas Bonifas, Morgan Spencer, and Simone Chaney for a conversation  on character and genre work as a vessel for the modern world.

Neva Ensminger-Holland: The stories “Friday Black,” “How to Sell a Jacket as Told by Ice King,” and “In Retail” all take place in store settings. Can you talk about what interests you about retail spaces as an avenue for storytelling?

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah: What interests me is how uninteresting it might seem at first glance. I used to work in a store as you maybe have guessed. I worked in retail. I worked in the Cross Gates Mall all through college. And I worked in a home improvement store in high school. I hated it, it wasn’t my favorite way to spend my time. But if you’re in a space long enough, you find something– if not interesting– useful about it. And by being there long enough, I realized there are some opportunities for me to be a human and feel connected to people, even though that’s not really what the space asks of you. It made me want to write about my own experience. For a long time I felt like my life wasn’t worthy of fiction or being turned into story. And it was my chance to play around with that.

Nicholas Bonifas: Staying on the topic of retail, Friday Black is full of really compelling characters, but the only one character—Ice King—is the focus of  both “How to Sell a Jacket as Told by Ice King” and “Friday Black.” Those are the same character correct?

NKAB: Yeah.

NB: So what made you choose him as a focus for multiple stories?

NKAB: Ice King, he’s the “me” stand-in for the mall space, so he felt easier to access. In some ways though—and it’s not explicit at all—he might be the same character in “The Hospital Where,” you know? Even in the other story, where it’s not from his point of view anymore—“In Retail”—he’s still present. For a long time that story was actually from Ice King’s point of view, but then I felt I was over-privileging this one space and that I’d rather look at this person who I’m sort of, in “How to Sell a Jacket,” almost villainizing. So in “In Retail,” we get to see her point of view. But yeah, Ice King ends up being the stand-in for all the stuff I had to deal with working in that space, so I just had more access to it because it was the actual thing I’ve experienced. Like I really wanted a jacket for my mom, you know? And I’ve really been the best salesman in more than one store. Not to brag or anything but (laughs) yeah, in the Cross Gates Mall I was really the best salesman.

Simone Chaney: The next question is specifically about “In Retail.” In the story, the narrator reflects on the necessity of human connection after helping the old woman in the store. In today’s socio-political climate, what do you hope audiences can take away from this?

NKAB: I hope that we can remember every interaction is an opportunity. It doesn't have to be some huge, grand space—a ceremony or wedding. You can create meaning out of you and me talking right now, paying attention and caring. It can be just as meaningful as everything else. And I’m hoping that if they do take something—and it’s always kind of a scary thing to hope for, as an author, what an audience is going to take away. I’m very much in this camp of what happens, happens. But I hope it's a reminder that any and every opportunity can be one where you sprinkle a little love. A little earnestness or being genuine. It could go a longer way than you might know. And it might help the other person, it might help you, too. So I’m hoping that it might remind people of that. And also be nicer to the person who’s asking if you want a free sample or you want to try whatever discount. They probably don’t want to be there either. They’re just forced to because of capitalism.  

Morgan Spencer: In the story “The Era,” the story is told from someone who wasn’t given any special abilities. Why did you decide to tell this story from that perspective instead of someone who was given special abilities? And then, as a follow-up, how do you decide which character should narrate your stories?

NKAB: I often am interested in the “stepped on” person, the person who’s a little bit less than. If not, I’ll go the extreme opposite, and someone who’s completely the best. I think we’ve all felt like the one who feels a little left out or who doesn’t have the special abilities or power—the one who isn’t the most talented. I know I’ve certainly felt that way. I have two sisters, an older sister and a younger sister, and I love them. I’m the dumb one of the siblings, which I usually don’t admit so readily, or at least I didn’t for a long time. But my older sister was pretty exemplary and my little sister is legitimately a genius. And she’s stronger than me, too. It's really embarrassing, but cool. I love it now. I feel like a lot of kids sympathize with someone who’s not the first pick, and it’s usually a more interesting space for a story to exist in. They have to fight for their existence and I’m really interested in that fight, the way they try to make space for themselves. The way the world might try and step on them and the way they try and resist that, or don’t. Generally, it’s because I know that they’re often pushed to difficult circumstances, which is just useful in a story. 

In general, how do I pick who’s going to narrate? It’s just whose voice feels interesting to me. I have to be able to hear it. But with that story in particular, I had a pretty good sense of, “Okay, I know what this guy sounds like.” He’s very very self-conscious and he’s a little bit of an addict. But despite it all, he is pretty sensitive, which makes him particularly mismatched to the world he’s in. And I think it was those components that made him feel like he was the most interesting narrator to me. Once I know who the narrator is, that’s when I can really start a story.  

SC: Several stories in your collection are told from the perspective of rather unlikable characters, like in “Light Spitter” or “Through the Flash.” And they have a history of actions that are largely unjustifiable. How does writing these characters change the writing process and how do you still manage to craft a connection between the character and the audience? 

NKAB: I’m interested in testing our ability to show grace and love. If you saw my next book, you’d be like, it’s even worse. Maybe not worse than Ama, that’s pretty tough. But Ama ends up becoming pretty likable because of the way I structure that story. If I would have put the scene with her doing the really evil stuff in the beginning, she probably would have been a lot harder sell. I’m interested in those people who do the most horrifying things. I’ve come to believe that they’re wounded. That’s not to say that we’re becoming apologists for what they’re doing, but I think that acknowledging that wounded-ness as coming from a societal flaw—which I think it almost always does—offers the opportunity for us to think, “What do we do now?”  Especially Ama, because I’m an abolitionist, I guess. 

What do we do with the really bad person right now? We have the incarceral system, we throw them in a hole basically, throw them in jail. But in Ama’s world, that’s not an option. So what do we do now? And then, as importantly, what does the person who knows they’ve done great evil do with themselves? Who can be redeemed? Who’s worthy of forgiveness? What does that conversation look like? I’m really interested in facilitating that round of questions for a reader– for myself, too– I’m not sure that I have the answers either. I just know that the way we’re doing it right now is wrong. That said, our view toward wrongdoing doesn’t properly honor victims. All it does is throw it in the closet, so to speak. No one has a chance to heal because it’s scary to really dive into those questions. 

And it’s difficult though, in the process of writing it. Like in the case of Fuckton, I know who he is and he’s a terrible, terrible person. But I’m older now, and I realize he’s just a kid. A really hurt kid. And of course he’s mega-entitled, but that's part of the homogeneous, patriarchal, heteronormative space we exist in. He feels very entitled because of that. And it happens to bloom in him in a very destructive way. But that story allows me to transcend that. What if he had the opportunity to really see himself in a bird’s-eye view that’s maybe not possible in the mortal realm? When people do harm it gets really easy to dismiss their humanity. And for me, a challenge of my work is to say, “Even those who do harm, dismissing their humanity is not on the table.” But we can see how they started to think of themselves as Other. How they started thinking of themselves as someone who is okay doing great harm. And maybe if we attack it that way, we’ll actually get to the issue instead of this placeholder of solving it, which is just dismissing them. And I think if we pay enough attention to them, a reader—a generous reader— may be more inclined to understand that person is a human, too. 

Neva Ensminger-Holland: Many of the stories in your collection (the two Simone just mentioned, “Light Spitter” and “Through the Flash” come to mind for me) take place outside of the normal progression of time. How do you approach writing a time loop or frozen time differently than a more traditional linear progression? 

NKAB: It’s interesting. When I have a big conceit which makes us move in or out of time, in some ways it’s not that different. I have a lot of thoughts about genre versus non-genre and how it’s not as real of a thing as we think it is. If you just forget about that you kind of just get to be like the avatar—talking about the last airbender, not the blue people. If writing realism or writing surreal stuff, if choosing one of those routes is like, “oh, I’m a firebender, or a waterbender.” When you aren’t worried about that, at least for me, I feel like I can be the avatar, I can do whatever. The lion turtle tells Aang, “back before the days of y’all bending in this physical realm, we were bending energy itself.” That’s how I feel about writing. That’s what I feel we’re doing as writers who aren’t really bound by that kind of stuff. I don’t have any negative toward working in genre spaces, I’m just saying it’s not that different. 

That said, I do know how readers perceive stuff, so sometimes, “Through the Flash” for example, it’s just a very particular world, because it’s not drawing as much from our communal reality, which is not the same anyway, our experiences already change our perceptions. So if I’m writing a story that’s more human-scale, or realism, or not in a time loop, or not some huge conceit, I still have to sell the world to you, make you feel as though you are in the narrator’s perspective. With a story that has a particularly intense conceit like “Through the Flash,” where the day is restarting and no one can really die, I have to highlight certain aspects that are particularly important. I have to say okay, this girl happens to be super strong, I’ll demonstrate that early on. She also happens to be one of the most evil people ever at one point in her life. I won’t say it all, but I’ll give us a gesture toward that. If she dies she’ll come back, I’ll demonstrate that really early on. In the stories with conceits or big surrealist divergences from “reality,” because dreams are part of reality, perception is a part of reality. If you are in any way neurodivergent, if you have any type of anxiety, it’s very clear to me at least that it’s not exactly the same thing we’re talking about anyway. If I am going to pull from something that doesn’t exist for any of us exactly that way sometimes I’ll use a surreal conceit which ironically enough will be the thing that all of us can understand because we’ve all maybe felt like, in a certain kind of loop.  It’s not that different, but also, it’s different. In the first movements of a story that’s pretty surreal I’ll be pretty intentional about certain things.

SC: This question is also about “Through the Flash.” Ama has a dream that could potentially foresee the end of the loop, but this quickly turns into an altercation with Carl. Because the short story is such a condensed form, how do you decide which narratives are developed and which ones are left more unexplained? 

NKAB: I guess the Einstein quote, which I hear is not even really an Einstein quote, “No great problem is solved on the plane of its original conception.” George Saunders has this quote, this is what I’ve been trying to find, but I’m just going to bleep it out myself, “If you want to write a story about two dogs F-ing, then you write a story about two dogs F-ing, now you have a story about two dogs F-ing.” That’s like his funny little thing that he says. That means the thing you set out to do, hopefully your story in the process of writing and revision is going to transcend that. 

So, if I start out to write a story like “Through the Flash,” I could worry about them figuring out how to get through the flash, but that for me feels predictable, and also sort of easy, and neat in a way that I don’t find life to be. So, I often will have this idea, and through writing it I’ll find a more interesting, more real place to arrive at. And the strands that kind of get left unfinished end up being more like a jumping off point for a story. So, in that story in particular the inciting incident is this dream Ama has which makes her want to do something different. Her whole life is characterized by the non-differentness of the day to day. She wants to pursue this fact, this interesting different thing. By the time the story is done, we aren’t sure if it was real exactly or not, but it’s almost like it reminded her to be connected to this other thing that is real. It reinforced her growth in a different way. That maybe it almost matters less if the loop is ending or not because, again, maybe she’s a little bit more sure of her potential redemption. She’s a little more sure of even Carl’s potential redemption. She’s a little more confident in her ability to, having gone all the way through evil, come out the other side better. I had to discover that just through the process of writing and revision. That’s often the case though, for me. I don’t always know when and where it’s going to happen, but it’s very rare that the way I think a story is going originally will be the way the story ends. If you’re not surprised yourself I don’t think the reader will ever be surprised. 

MS: “Through the Flash” and “The Finklestein Five” are both the longest stories in the collection. Why did you decide to have the longest stories be at the beginning and the end of the collection? 

NKAB: I didn’t know they were the longest, but I knew they were the most intense, and they had the most rollercoaster-y things. Also, “The Finkelstein Five” was very important to be the first story for me for a lot of reasons. I thought that if someone reads that story and they’re like “screw this guy, he sucks,” at least I got to say something I think was important one time, albeit in a pretty intense way. It ended up having to be longer because it kind of has this dual narrative structure with both Emanuel and the sort of A-line, then the court case happening almost simultaneously, but in the past through his memory. 

“Through the Flash” is the last story in the book because I kind of wanted to end on a literal bang. Also, it was such a challenging story to write at the time. I’m really into, as a writer, challenging myself to do things— my favorite stories are the ones that when I start them are a little beyond my powers as a writer. “The Finkelstein Five,” it took a long time to write that story. It was with insane amounts of revision. By the time I was done I kind of figured out oh, I can do this. That’s something I can do, I don’t think other people are doing. I felt that strongly —this was before Get Out had come out—it felt different to me. Then when I did “Through the Flash” again I felt like this is a pretty big undertaking for a short story, this feels like it could be a novel pretty easily, but I think I can do this in a short story. I also am bookended by probably the two most violent stories, and I wanted the reminder, I guess that it’s not like some easy way out, it just felt like the proper ending. They’re pretty dark. When I’m in my bag so to speak, this is one of the things I can do that I think that other people don’t do. They feel like very Nana stories to me. 

So, that’s part of why, but also “Through the Flash” was just very ambitious, and I wanted to end on, not a mic drop, but something almost like that. Something I barely believe I pulled off, and I don’t know if I pulled it off, maybe you guys are like “you didn’t,” but I wanted that feeling of, this feels very difficult. I remember when I sent it to George Saunders, my thesis adviser,  and I said actually wait, don't read that story yet, and I worked on it some more and then I sent it to him again. I think I did that twice actually, I was like, don’t read that version, because I was like, I think I can get this right, I think I can get this right. It still took me many more years after that, but it was a very, very difficult story, and I wanted—if you get to the end you almost get this almost supernova of a thing that hopefully people like. But also some people are like, “I don’t get it and it sucks,” so that’s fine either way. I know for me it felt ambitious. 

NEH: Sort of on the topic of length, “Things My Mother Said” is the shortest story in the collection, and yet it’s one of the most grounded in our present reality. Why did you decide to make it flash fiction, and when you’re writing flash fiction as opposed to longer stories how does your approach change? 

NKAB: It’s something that matters to me when I think about story. If I could make every story flash I would. But, in particular with that story, one of my professors, Arthur Flowers, we did an exercise and it was actually to write a story to save the world, and it’s surprising that I would write [Things My Mother Said] for that because that probably comes off to some people as my least sociopolitically concerned story. But that was the story I wrote for that prompt. He was like “cut it down, cut it down.” He kept on having me cut it down, so it was kind of getting prompted by this person. But I felt very okay with doing that because in the book it acts like a brief interlude, like on an album. There’s sort of that little interlude there where it’s this really dope interlude, but it’s only like a minute and twenty-two seconds. It happened to be the interlude of my real actual life without my imagination painting it the way I see it. “The Hospital Where” is also my real life, and maybe just as true, but when people think about familiar realities, “Things My Mother Said” is just a thing that actually happened in actual time that other people could perceive besides me. I think I wanted it short because it almost acts like a little reprieve or something after the intensity of “The Finkelstein Five,” if you’re reading [the collection] in order. If you think about me as a writer, that book is like my career. So “The Finkelstein Five” is the first thing people have ever heard of me and “Things My Mother Said” is the second. I think early on in my career I wanted to say to my mom like, “thank you, and I love you.” Then quickly back to the regular scheduled program. 

MS: In the story “Lark Street,” there's a psychic who the narrator does not believe, and it is later revealed that the psychic was paid by the narrator. How do you decide which fantastical elements to include in the stories and which elements that could be fantastical are left in the real world?

NKAB: It’s all about finding a way to keep yourself guessing and keep yourself surprised and following the energy of the story. It's hard to say a real answer, because I don’t know if I exactly know why I will choose one or the other. There’s a funny kind of incongruity that I guess exists when you have these fetuses talking to you, but you’re still skeptical about the possibility of psychics. That character’s non-belief is a part of the story, so I think it ends up being very case by case, in terms of my stories. In that story I remember the line, “You don’t believe in anything,”—I kind of needed the evidence and I also needed a thing that’s both magic, but also human, and could be altered or not. I think it just worked for that particular story. Deciding where the “magic” is just depends on what the story calls for. 

SC: Many of the stories that make the largest statements on modern topics also contain futuristic, or supernatural elements, like “Zimmerland” or “Light Spitter.”What value do you see in using speculative fiction for social commentary as opposed to more strictly realistic fiction?

NKAB: I think that with speculative stuff for myself, I can say both exactly what I want to say, but also not be on the nose. I could write “Friday Black,” the story, and it just feels more fun and interesting than being like, capitalism sucks. I get to have fun with it. I get to create a new space where I can find something else other than just saying the thing. I guess I don’t want to merely represent the aspects of society that I don’t prefer or that are actively killing me. I want to take some power over it too and make it like my sort of playground, so something like that feels very powerful, when I get to take something that might be harmful to me or the people I know and love and make it my own. And I think it also becomes not necessarily a safe space, but another space to regard it that might be—not the same kind of traumatic. 

By the time I wrote “Zimmerland,” I had already totally disengaged from ever watching like the extrajudicial murdering of Black people when it was captured on any type of media, but I still want to say something about it, so I crave that sort of story. For me it is just a fun way of saying exactly what I want to say without it being on the nose. I get to have that sort of fluidity to do both at the same time, and also working in the speculative space, sometimes I just really like it, sometimes it just feels fun and fresh and it can be anything. I like the anythingness of it, that’s always a draw. Choosing the speculative space for those kind of stories, it just feels like a good metaphor will just come to me sometimes and I’ll be like, this is just the easier way for me to talk about it, [rather] than me retraumatizing myself by actually just talking about something that just normally happens.

I feel very weird about adding humor which is a big part of my work. Sometimes I feel like if I use hyperbole I have access to humor in a way I don’t always have if I’m sticking to realism. Even though realism can be pretty funny too, it's just harder for me to receive it, so I know it would be harder for the reader to receive it. I also think that it’s easier to receive, it’s not exactly criticism, because again I don’t feel like I’m on some hill telling people what to do. I’m really just asking questions like, “hey, is this what we want?” I think it’s easier to ask that question when I’m like, not you, but instead imagine you but in the future. Like, is this cool? I then hope that the reader on their own will make that connection. I feel like that slight depersonalization creates an avenue for a deeper connection. 

NEH: In a similar vein, towards the end of this story “Zimmerland” the dystopian theme park where the speaker works begins to allow children inside. Why did you decide to include this detail in this story? And how do you feel this decision is in conversation with more current issues of what children should be allowed to be exposed to?

NKAB: Yeah. I think I remember choosing that and I was like, this space is already not great, but what would maybe make the Isaiah character feel like this is pushing it over the edge? I think including kids in it, it’s kind of really basic, but everyone feels like kids have a lot of potential to become anything, and I think including them in that sort of space shows just how citizen some of our sort of spaces can become. It felt like a reminder that racism is inherited, as is so many of the “isms” that shape our world, and I wanted something that felt like even a supposedly “good” place would do in the name of money. Not a supposedly “good” place, but a place that’s on its own face trying to pretend that it’s doing something positive or lying to itself about doing something positive…and kids just felt like the right thing. Especially having dealt with all that we’ve seen in those spaces. I was in college when Trayvon Martin was murdered; Trayvon Martin was a child himself. Something about having kids in the park just felt particularly devastating. 

NB: In your essay “Why Write Political Stories,” you mention needing to trust your readers to know that you’re saying things at a slant. How do you go about crafting the high levels of nuance in your pieces?

NKAB: I think language is a huge part of it just on sentence-level stuff. It’s hard because every story has its own version of that slant-making. There’s something that people might read  completely seriously until I perform it and then they can kind of see the joke there. For me it depends on sentence-level attention and really trying to make my rhythm and timing have a joke appeal or not holding a punch line. Humor is an important piece of it. If we’re paying really close attention to the sentence level and making it as airtight as possible that you get to where you’re going to a certain point, and then the reader is going to do what the reader is going to do. It just comes from really close attention. The key is sentence-level tension I think. George Saunders is one of my good mentors, [and] by now for most of his readership, people just know that’s his thing. He’s going to be funny, as well as his language, it’s so inflected, you get a sense of weirdness, and that the slant is there. If you don’t write very inflected language, inflected meaning like in “The Era,” where it’s clear this kid is from a different space, versus “How to Sell A Jacket,” which is more or less my regular conversational speech. The way people read that is going to be very different, but it’s just different types of attention, really paying close attention, and hoping they understand. 

NB: I have another question about that essay. You also mention that you wrote political pamphlets in college, how has that experience impacted the way you write today, and how did those pamphlets evolve into writing the nuanced fiction you write today? 

NKAB: Doing the pamphlets was important, I guess, because I cared, but I had no money to do this. I want my words to be in the world about issues I care about. And I’m a project-based person, so I liked having the space to do that, but that person kind of had to die a little bit. It was an ego death to see the lack of response to those, I kind of had to get over myself. I was kind of ignorant, I mean, obviously I understood how pervasive racism is, and so many of these other systems that guide life in America were. I was able to sort of slide by not really understanding how much thought people had been putting into those exact issues. So, those pamphlets taught me like, you don’t know anything, and you’re also kind of an asshole. I did it really, really earnestly. I still like the kid who did that because I tried something, but it’s just not art. It’s like that person could’ve never written that story from Ama’s point of view, because like, you’re bad, go to jail, or something. It was sort of me on a hill telling you how ignorant you were, where like, a lot of the important parts of my stories, you implicate yourself,  that same harshness is in you too— it manifests differently, but it’s there. And I had to have that experience and that failure to recognize, like, bro, chill first off, or don’t chill, but like, see that it’s about communal answers, it’s about asking, it’s about coming together to try to figure something out. And at that time, I thought I had way more answers than I did. I had to have that experience, or that flop, if you will, to know that, and I’m very grateful it happened. I don’t think I’d be talking to you all now if it hadn’t.

SC: In a bit of a different direction, the story “The Lion and the Spider” was cut with scenes from a west African myth of the same name. What made you choose this story to look at the speaker’s relationship with his father? 

NKAB: I’m Ghanaian, and I was told those stories. My father, when we were really young, used to really tell Anansi stories, and there was usually a lion or a tiger antagonist. He just kind of made them up. I don’t know if there was a specific one that I was pulling from, but I knew I wanted to tell that story, and I wanted to use something real from my childhood. I had gotten those stories, and that was sort of my introduction to storytelling, oral myths. If you know Anansi, he was always doing some trick, which I identify with a lot. You know, sometimes it’s for the betterment of everybody, and sometimes it’s not. And he’s kind of tricky, and with my relationship with my dad at the time, I felt like he was both Anansi and the lion, it was an interesting time. I was actually in high school, when I was working at that store, and I just needed to ground it in reality, cause it’s like this folktale type thing. It just grounded it a little bit for me. It felt sort of like a passing of the baton, in terms of my heritage, but also in terms of storytelling too. Like it was my chance to tell a new Anansi story.

NB: In “The Hospital Where,” we see the narrator talk a lot about his motivation and inspiration for writing. What was the inspiration for that story specifically, and how does the narrator’s motivation to write relate to your motivation to write?

NKAB: Honestly, that’s just me. I mean, it’s obviously evolved and grown now, but “The Hospital Where,” I think is as true as “Things My Mother Said,” for me. My father passed away from cancer two years ago, but I wrote that story before he was super sick. He had been a little sick, here and there, and I didn’t know what was going to happen, but sometimes you just kind of know. In terms of my relationship to writing, at first, it was kind of very, very obsessive and dark. It was kind of like the Twelve Tongued god, for me, but it was secret though. I’m a pretty chill, affable, whatever person, but in my heart, I was like, I’m gonna do this. It wasn’t healthy or sustainable, and I wrote that story as a way of kind of acknowledging that. Also, seeing how at first, writing was a dissociative practice for me, because I didn’t like a lot of the stuff that was going on in my actual, physical life, and in that story it talks a lot about the physical means, which were bad and were just true and they defined a lot of my life. Viewing writing as this weird escape from it was what I did, [and] it created this sort of harsh attitude towards myself. I wasn’t very loving towards myself, I was pretty mean when I read my work. And you have to go from pretty bad to okay, in my opinion, as a writer, but my internal monologue was self-edited, and really, really mean, so my muse, if you will, or my Twelve Tongue God, it just felt true in that way. That’s how my writing person felt in me, either being really harsh or just like controlling me in a way I had no real power over. And now, I'm at ease with it, and totally down with it, and it’s cool, but it sounds pretty dark, but that’s what it was, so it's close to my real life. It’s like, if writing is a power, which you’ve probably heard from some of other writers, that is the case, and it is, it’s a great superpower to have, that was kind of like my origin story. I think I’m going to write another one, where I have a little bit more mastery over that character.

NB: Do you ever find that other art forms that you practice, like photography or music, affect your writing process, or vice versa? And if so, how does that look? 

NKAB: I think that photography has made my writing process more visual. I've also started thinking in scenes more, maybe I just had to to get through this novel, because it’s been a pretty brutal grind, but I’ve been thinking like this is a scene, and then this is another scene, like that. I think that music—which I’m more of a beginner at, even though I do want to come out with an album—being a listener of music had already informed so much of my thoughts about writing. I thought about “The Finklestein Five,” the first story in my book, as like this big, very me sound, then there’s this acoustic interlude, which is “Things My Mother Said.” And I think music escalation is something that my stories are always aspiring to. To think about how you can always use layering or growing your voice to build up that tension in a song, is something that I try to do in my stories, and I think they all affect each other, they all sort of meld, they’re all the same thing, it’s all storytelling really. They all sort of bleed into one another in ways I’m probably not able to perceive yet. 

NEH: What were you reading when you were writing Friday Black, and also, what are you reading now? 

NKAB: I was reading everything, I was doing my MFA, so I was reading a lot. I was reading Aimee Bender for the first time, Gayl Jones for the first time. I had already read Toni Morrison a little bit, but I was reading more Toni Morrision. I was reading poetry for the first time, and poets that are friends of mine that have books now, like Chen Chen. But outside of that, Nicole Sealey, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, literally so much. I had stacks of books like this every semester. It would be easier to tell you who I wasn’t reading, honestly. I read Russian writers like Chekov and stuff, in George [Saunders’s] classes. Random short stories that I really loved from so many different people. I was reading as wide as I’d ever read, ever. And now, now I read less widely, unfortunately. I read a lot of blurbs that people send me. Let’s see, what have I read recently that I’ve really loved? I’m reading a book right now called Dirtbag in Massachusetts, by Isaac Fitzgerald. It's a memoir, it’s really good. Cleanness by Garth Greenwell, I read recently, beautiful book. Office of Historical Corrections, that’s a book that’s available for everyone to read, it’s a short story collection by Danielle Evans. I love that book. Oh, a book called Homeland Elegies, I’m reading now and it’s really nice. It’s fiction, but it’s a memoir, by Ayad Akhtar.

SC: You recently announced your upcoming novel, Chain Gang All-Stars. Is there anything you can tell us about it? 

NKAB: It’s so weird hearing other people say that title, it’s been like a secret for like eight years. Besides the title, it’s about an imagined future. It’s really intense, it’s a very Nana type thing. It’s more “Through the Flash” than “Things My Mother Said.” It has, like, weird things in it. Some people might call it sci-fi, I wouldn’t really, but it does take place in the future.