KATE JENKS LANDRY

10 Questions with Vincent Anioke

One day a few years ago, my husband, Michael, came home from his job as a Software Engineer and told me a story about his day. He had noticed a very thick novel on his colleague Vincent’s desk. When he had expressed his admiration that Vincent was reading such an imposing volume, Vincent casually mentioned that, actually, he had written it. As a teenager. Like, no big deal.

I was instantly highly intrigued! Although Michael and I talk to each other constantly about our work, it is often like we are speaking different languages— we listen, and nod, and do our best follow along. I was fascinated by the idea of an individual person who had one foot in each of our professional worlds.

Since then, I have had the privilege of meeting Vincent on a handful of occasions. Not only is he great at both of his jobs, he is also warm, funny, and super interesting to talk to. I have been thrilled to follow along as his writing has gained more and more attention. His dense, evocative short stories have appeared in several literary journals and magazines, including Callaloo, Carve, Split Lip, and Pithead Chapel. Recently, “Utopia” was long-listed for the 2021 CBC Short Story Prize, while another, “Ogbuefi”, was short-listed for the 2021 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

Vincent is currently at work on a full-length collection of stories, and I can’t wait to get my hands on it. In the meantime, I am still thinking about his powerful conversation with Davina Philomena Kawuma on the website Africa in Dialogue, entitled “What it Means to Be a Man”. It is such a great read and totally worth checking out!

1. I’ve read that, as a kid growing up in Nigeria, you fell in love with your dad’s huge library. Were there books that were especially important to you as a child or a teenager? Was writing part of your childhood, too, or did it find you later?
Vincent: My first memories of consistently enjoyable reading are the Enid Blyton children's books, but Harry Potter books defined my foray into longer-form fiction. The vivid magical world they let me inhabit bled into my reality. I wandered around home with a twig I pretended was a wand, poking my siblings beneath mutterings of nefarious spells. I sat by a window pretending that if I focused hard enough, an owl would materialize with my Hogwarts letter. From grades 7 to 11, I also tried to recreate that magic by handwriting a six-volume, 2000-page science fiction series called Sagittarius, spanning four galaxies ruled by a treacherous “Cosmotic Federation”. Sagittarius was a potent escape from the monotony of boarding school. So in a strong sense, writing has always been a part of my early years. Of course, then, I paid no attention to craft. I killed and resurrected (but mostly killed) characters and dumped heaps of over-the-top plot twists with shameless impunity and unfiltered prose.

2. What form did your education as a writer take? Did you do courses in literature or writing as part of your formal schooling, or did you find other ways to learn and hone your craft? Were there mentors, either IRL or on the page, that helped you find and refine your voice?
Vincent: Formally, I only ever took a handful of creative writing electives at university, since my major was Computer Science and Engineering. Three of those classes were taught by the same woman, Professor Helen Lee, who characterized my early stories as skillfully written but themeless. She was the biggest agent of change in my writing, turning my focus from shocking the reader with plot twists (how many times can the killer be the protagonist’s cryogenically-frozen, now-ten-years-older twin brother?) to engaging them with character-driven pieces reflecting my worldview and identity. 17-year-old Vincent would never have written “The Alchemy Of His Own Mirror”, which is partly about the nervously unfolding friendship between a barber and his client. Professor Lee gave me a strong appreciation for the more literary aspects of fiction—theme, language, character—and I try to further my writing by carefully reading stories and novels where these aspects feel skillfully rendered.

Kate: It’s funny how we form these notions of what writing is supposed to be as we grow up — what literature is supposed to look and feel like. I sort of had the opposite problem. From the time I was a very young teenager right through graduate school, I read a lot of Very Serious Literary Fiction and Very Somber Canadian Poetry and internalized the idea that that was the ultimate goal. I also loved Harry Potter, but, while I often wished I was Hermione Granger, I never aspired to be JK Rowling. I honestly never saw that as an option. I figured that if I wanted to be a writer and still be taken seriously as a professional adult, then I had better be a serious writer of serious fiction. As a result, I somehow graduated with an MA in Creative Writing never having written anything with a proper plot or real stakes. I certainly had never written anything anyone might dare call fun. (I still don’t aspire to be JK Rowling, but now for different reasons.)

Joining critique groups with writers who fall at different points along the spectrum from commercial to literary has helped me understand where my own work falls. I still gravitate towards the more literary end of the spectrum in whatever genre I happen to be reading or writing in—I love tightly controlled prose and complex characters subtly rendered. I love stories that explore a theme without insisting on a moral. But I also love wizards, and murderers who turn out to be cryogenically frozen twin brothers. I am pretty sure I would have devoured Sagittarius.

3. On the surface, software engineering doesn’t seem all that connected to the work of writing fiction. Do you feel like they are entirely separate animals, or are there parallels between the two types of work for you? Does one impact or inform the other?
Vincent: The easiest parallel between the two is immersive creation. I sit down for a few highly focused hours to code or write, and by the end, I have made an entity—a short story filled with lost characters, a program to execute Advanced Search in Gmail while offline—that previously didn’t exist. The physical world around me disappears so thoroughly that taking a break from either is akin to waking from a dream. The creation act is about sorting disorder into order. When approaching storytelling or feature implementation, there is an initial swell of potential ideas that bounce around my head, even as I’m showering, eating, walking to work. They are specters, haunting me till they find peace at the end of a blinking cursor. There’s a common thought that art/writing is “messy” and coding is “clean”, but there’s a neatness to finally interweaving character motivations and conflicts into engaging plot, and a chaos to prototyping various hacky solutions on the path to functional, scalable code. So, yes, there are strong mental connections. That said, I find that one doesn’t directly inform the other, except parasitically, since long days of coding equate to short days of writing, and vice-versa. Both feel very mentally draining, which means I have to be strategic about how they fit in my schedule.

Kate: The idea of “immersive creation” as a common element makes so much sense. The times when Michael or I become fully subsumed in a problem or an idea are the times when work habits look most similar. During these phases, one of us will blow in the front door full of excitement because of a lightning bolt moment we had while walking the dog. Or, we will jump out of the shower with a fresh idea. Michael often jokes that I do most of my work wrapped in a towel, dripping all over my desk — there is something about the shower that just helps things to slide into place!

The way you describe “prototyping hacky solutions on the path to a functional, scalable code” makes me think about what it is like to write a crappy first (and second, and third. . .) draft of a story. You can come up with a version of that something that kind-of-sort-of works, but is inelegant, or inefficient, or weak. That process of cleaning up prose, tightening syntax, making everything more robust, feels similar to the way Michael talks about his work sometimes.

4. I have heard so much about your love of Taylor Swift. Like, if you are mentioned around our house, my kids say, “He’s the guy who is an engineer like Dad, AND a writer like Mom, AND loves T. Swift, right?” What is it about her work that speaks to you so powerfully?
Vincent: First of all, reading this was touching. I really appreciate that characterization. I’ve had less flattering juxtapositions of “Taylor Swift” against other aspects of my identity, most noticeably in university when a Black friend pondered why a Black man would be listening to a “basic white woman”. The false description aside, my reason is simple: her themes embody the kind of writing I seek to create—emotive and universal, yet highly specific. She makes me feel things, whether I’m reliving past heartaches or experiencing a shadow of her own pain. Take “Last Kiss” for instance, one of my all-time favorite songs. It haunts me with the specific ache of grieving a bygone love by looping through once-bright memories, even with diaristic details like “That July 9th, the beat of your heart”, and “I’ll watch your life in pictures like I used to watch you sleep”. These days, I write because something provoked an emotion in me that I want to capture in a bottle, however imperfectly, and pass around. It’s a constant yearning for a connection with my past and the greater world around me. I love Taylor Swift because she embodies and executes this yearning so well.

Kate: “Emotive and universal, yet highly specific.” This also describes so much of what I love about your own work, which invites me into worlds which are, in many ways, outside of my experience, but always provides familiar emotional ropes I can grab hold of to anchor myself as I absorb and make sense of what is new and exciting to me. Your story “The Alchemy of His Own Mirror,” for example, places me inside a discussion between the protagonist and his barber which, while casual on the surface, is also heavy with the weight of difficult shared experiences that are outside of my own. At the same time, certain aspects of their interaction are immediately recognizable to me—what it’s like to sit in the hairstylist’s chair and engage in the kind of conversation that falls in that awkward valley between small talk and intimate conversation between friends. I love how this story maps the moment when the relationship between acquaintances tips over into genuine friendship. So much literature deals with the the taking of romantic leaps, but this experience—the vulnerability of putting yourself out there with someone you hope might want to be your friend—is just as recognizable, just as harrowing.

5. You wrote and published a novel when you were still really young (was it a novel?), and you have previously mentioned in interviews that you dabbled in poetry as a student away at boarding school. These days, though, you are having a lot of success as a writer of short fiction. Can you tell me a bit about your approach to writing short stories? Why this form?
Vincent: It was a novel! A 550-page melodramatic thriller called Whirlwind of Metamorphosis, written during a gap year between high school and university. Short fiction only became of interest to me during my writing classes at university. I was impressed by how vivid conflicts and large worlds and entire histories could be compressed into a few pages. I’ll always want to write novels, but they require a long-term commitment to a certain Grand Idea. Short stories invite a faster-paced sort of experimentation with the imagination. You can play around with different themes and settings and forms and character types from start to finish in a relatively short amount of time. And relatively matters here! I’ve read about short fiction writers who take years to complete a single short story. At first, it seemed ludicrous. Now, I’ve watched a story of mine start out as flash fiction (less than 1000 words) and grow into a 7,000-word piece, and then get revised and revised and revised over months. There’s always something to tweak, always something that feels off. The tightness of a short story means that you pay greater attention to individual words and sentences and characters, a perfectionistic approach to editing that can prolong the process, but also highlights another thing I love about the form—it makes me pay special attention to the craft of writing, to the role of individual components in a narrative.

Kate: Yes! All of this speaks to me as a picture book writer who sometimes spends years working on the same 700-word story. I am constantly ripping pieces apart at the seams and rebuilding them, trying a different point of view, a different tense, a different tone. Then, once I have finally settled on all of these basic structural elements, I begin endlessly picking and tweaking—word choice, syntax, page breaks. This is possible because of how short the pieces are; there is so much freedom in knowing that you can write it one way, and if it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t matter because you can just do it again. At the same time, this also means that there is so much pressure on every word; each sentence has to be so muscular—has to lift so much weight—and yet, you don’t want all that effort to show.

I also write poetry, and there is so much that I take from that form into my picture book writing, just not the things most people think! It is not about flowery language or whimsical details (well, sometimes it is!). It’s mostly about compression, communicating information, and evoking emotion in the fewest possible strokes.

6. I understand that you are currently working on your first short story collection. What has that process been like for you? Are there certain preoccupations or motifs that thread their way through the collection? How do you think about structure, about creating a whole out of parts?
Yep, I am working on a collection! This decision was a surprise to me, as my first intended artistic project out of university was a now-shelved novel idea. For the first two years of work, I didn’t write much, but once I got back into it, I mostly dabbled in short stories since time best permitted the form. I invariably write about Nigerians in high-octane situations (and “high octane” has meant anything from a character trying to make a new friend in an unfamiliar country to having a non-consensually filmed sex tape leak and grow viral in their religious community), and their attempts to deal with them. This turning point of stress may come right at the story’s start or may be a climax, but the shadow of its existence forms the vehicle in which I explore the characters and Nigeria, my home country. I live in Canada now, and before that, I was in the United States for school, and I’ve noticed an interest in the kinds of stories that exhibit a cultural seam: stories that could never happen in North America or would play out very differently here. For instance, a person’s sex tape leaking in Boston would mostly invite support and sympathy, whereas in Enugu, my birth state, it might invite disdain for perceived sexual immorality. I suppose that invites a motif of systemic West African critique threading my stories, which I’ve consciously tried to temper by also celebrating what I consider the best aspects of our cultural heritage, as in a recent story, “The Smallness of Asking”. Beyond this, I’m not thinking of an especially cohesive structure for the anthology. I simply want to write stories that seem inherently interesting to me, until there’s a good enough number to curate an anthology from. Fingers crossed!

I invariably write about Nigerians in high-octane situations
— Vincent Ainoke
Kate: Since reading your answer to this question, I can’t stop thinking about it. The notion that stakes are often subject to cultural context seems so obvious when you put it this way, but it isn’t always addressed in conversations about writing or literature within mainstream North American culture.

I think, also, that the balance between critique and celebration you mentioned is one of the things that makes your work so powerful, whether you are applying it to your depiction of a culture or to an individual. I love that you never let your characters off the hook, but you also never deny them the dignity of their full humanity—you allow them to be many things at once.

I also LOVE your use of the term “high-octane situations” here! I am totally going to steal that!

7. While this pandemic has been a strange collective experience, it has also been so different for each person. What has this period looked and felt like for you? How has it impacted your writing practice? Has it taught or given you anything valuable?
Vincent: The pandemic has been this weird mixed blob. I do think isolation has given me more time to write, but it’s also lessened my potential sources of inspiration—many of which are sparked by simply being out and doing things around friends. I’ve also come to appreciate how my writing life is part of a system mediated by its component forces: mental health, physicality, work, sustained friendships, and so on. My steady workout routine was obliterated. I gained some weight. My dad contracted Covid, to briefly but terrifyingly debilitating effect. I started listening to sad songs more often. But also more music in general (with massive gains to my personal playlist), and doing more reading. Overall, the last two years have given me a perspective of fragility. Our once-taken-for-granted routines are so brittle. So is life. So is any kind of certainty. With the world opening up again, I’m grateful for each spine-breaking hug a friend gives me, and each popcorn kernel that sticks to my teeth at the movies, and hearing my dad laugh on the phone. He’s a thousand miles away, and when he laughs, I want to reach across the distance, and save the sound in my pocket, because it wasn’t so long ago that he was coughing hard enough to scare me.

With the world opening up again, I’m grateful for each spine-breaking hug a friend gives me, and each popcorn kernel that sticks to my teeth at the movies, and hearing my dad laugh on the phone. He’s a thousand miles away, and when he laughs, I want to reach across the distance, and save the sound in my pocket, because it wasn’t so long ago that he was coughing hard enough to scare me.
— -Vincent Anioke
Kate: I am so, so glad to hear that you father is okay. You hit the nail on the head when you say that the pandemic shone a light on the fragility and brittleness of so much. The magic of each ‘spine-breaking hug’ (my daughters call them ‘squishers,’ or ‘bone crushers’) is so clear to me these days, too.

8. Congratulations on being longlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize and shortlisted for the Commonwealth prize in 2021! What have those experiences been like? Have they changed anything, or given you a sense of momentum?
Vincent: Those experiences were absolutely insane. The emails came within days of each other, and for very different stories, so it was a real validation. Rejections are guaranteed in the world of short fiction. Currently, I have ~9 rejections for every acceptance, and I think I’ve gotten good at taking the NOs in stride. Still, when you’ve spent hours, days, weeks, months, on a piece, only for it to be turned down in one paragraph, there’s a fluttering “what-if”, as in, what if you’re no good? What these nominations have done is really push that what-if to the furthest reaches of my mind. I feel more empowered than ever to write and create and send my work out there, so there’s definitely a strong sense of momentum. I feel grateful and honored.

Kate: I know that fluttering “what if” feeling well! I think every person who creates does. I am very proud of my ability to absorb the NOs these days, but I can’t deny that every YES makes the next rejection a little easier to swallow.

9. What does your workspace look like? Do you write and code in the same place? What essentials (rituals, objects, tools, snacks, etc.) can you not write without?
I tend to work in my office den and write on a barstool behind my kitchen counter. The den is a dim-lit space cluttered with fiction books and a large monitor and math-strewn sheets of paper. It’s cozy in a hermit-like sort of way, and for whatever reason, works well for coding. But the kitchen counter is in front of large, sun-lit windows. It is next to an airy living room space. I think the relative vastness of my writing center makes my mind feel uninhibited as I approach first drafts. When I get stuck on a plot point or on how to word a character’s defining epiphany, I sometimes will get up and pace around in circles, so the expanse helps with that too. I don’t think there are any physical objects I need for writing though. I’ll often put a bottle of water next to my laptop before starting, but I get so lost in my head that the bottle is barely touched.

10. What does a day in your life look like? What do you hope your typical day might look like in 5 years?
A weekday looks like this: Alarm-less Wake Up at 9:30/10 (which I do not take for granted) + Skipping Breakfast + Hours of Coding + Lunch + Hours of Coding + Choose One of (Break + Hours of Writing, Hanging With Friends, Watching Netflix, Jamming to Music, Errands). Weekends are The Same — (Hours of Coding) + Choose Yet Another One of (Napping, Catching Up With Family in Nigeria, Sadly Window-Shopping Houses).

In five years, I’m hoping it looks mostly the same, but with a house secured and more writing and way more traveling. Too much of the world feels unexplored.

Kate: I have my fingers crosses that you find the perfect home soon!

11. If you could throw a fantasy dinner party for any 10 people, who would you invite? What would the soundtrack be? What would be on the menu?
Vincent: Chinua Achebe, to tell me all the stories he never got to finish. Taylor Swift, to ask her if she cried when she wrote “Last Kiss”. Stephen King, to reprimand him for making the afterlife unbearably scary in Revival. Clark Kent, the Smallville version, because I had many teenage dreams of being his trusty sidekick. My mom, so we can gossip about some of the stranger guests in our native language without being overheard. Albert Einstein, so that he can tell me which quotes he actually said and which ones Twitter made up. My grandfather, because he died before I could know him, and because he can tell me all the funny/embarrassing stories about my father that my father hasn’t shared. Pierre de Fermat, so that I could hook him up to a lie detector and ask him if he really did prove his Last Theorem, or if he’s a dirty liar. Eve from the Garden, because she’s gotten way too much flak for eating a fruit, and I suspect her side of the story will make for some good dinner discussion. Finally, Darth Vader, so that the night has a constant ominous undercurrent and a 30.7% chance of abrupt chaos. The soundtrack would be a Spotify playlist of lively Afrobeats, so that not a single eyelid droops in boredom. The menu would feature spicy abacha with chunks of fried fish (it’s been too long since I had this, so it’s invariably on my mind), bowls of vanilla ice cream (yes, it’s the best flavor), and an assortment of hard liquor.

Kate: Don’t tell anyone else I have interviewed, but this is my favourite answer to this question so far! I would like to sit between Darth Vader and Eve please.

12. What food brought you the most comfort as a kid? What about now?
When I was a kid, a woman would march outside the streets near home with a large tray of okpa on her head. Okpa is a bulbous yellow native delicacy wrapped in green leaves, and there was no greater joy than securing a few hundred naira from my mom after school, dashing outside to meet the woman, and getting several wraps for me and my siblings. The comfort came, in retrospect, from a multitude of things: the assured constancy of that woman’s presence, the unsaid promises of providence in my mom’s outstretched hand, and the communion of my siblings. I haven’t had okpa in years, and the very next time I do, it has to be next to my 3 brothers and 2 sisters.

These days, jollof rice brings me the most comfort. If I’m having it, it’s likely because I’m around the West African friends I made in Canada. Their presence manages to feel both nostalgic—from our shared memories of where we came from—and brand new.

Kate: I have never made jollof rice, but every time someone mentions it I make a mental note to try. Spicy rice dishes of all kinds are one of my weaknesses (and Michael’s, for sure!). Do you have a go-to recipe? Send it to me! Or, better yet, come over sometime and cook it with me. We always have vanilla ice cream and hard liquor on hand, so it will be worth your while!

13. What should I be reading this summer? Watching?
Reading: Half Of A Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Adichie. It’s a few years old, but this harrowing and well-rendered account of Nigeria’s bloody civil war will transport you to the forefront of seemingly unimaginable horrors. Within the darkness, it will also show you layers of such earnest humanity.

Watching: the movie HER, because it had me thinking for days about what it truly means to fall in love, how much of it is in service of the self vs. the other.