Launch Party Preview: Interviews with Hannah Tinti and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
We’re celebrating the launch of issue 44 this Friday, October 25. Ahead of the launch of Issue 44, we’ve excerpted interviews with Hannah Tinti and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah from the new issue.
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is from Spring Valley, New York. He graduated from SUNY Albany and went on to receive his MFA from Syracuse University. He was the '16-'17 Olive B. O'Connor fellow in fiction at Colgate University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including Guernica, Compose: A Journal of Simply Good Writing, Printer’s Row, Gravel, and The Breakwater Review, where he was selected by ZZ Packer as the winner of the 2nd Annual Breakwater Review Fiction Contest. Friday Black is his first book. Adjei-Brenyah is the recipient of the Breakwater Review Fiction Contest, selected by ZZ Packer; the National Book Foundation’s Five Under Thirty-Five Authors for 2018, selected by Colson Whitehead; and the 2018 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. Friday Black was longlisted for the John Leonard Prize and short- listed for the 2019 Dylan Thomas Prize and the Young Lions Fiction Award.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: One of the first pages readers turn to when they open your collection is the brief and beautiful dedication page, which states, “For my mom, who asks, ‘How can you be bored? How many books have you written?’” I find it extremely compelling that she says “written” and not “read,” because now, here you are: an author of your own narratives. Can you talk about how your family and, specifically, how being Ghanaian has influenced your writing?
NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH: It’s kind of hard to say how it’s influenced my writing because my parents, being who they are and where they’re from, kind of says everything about me. It is interesting how she did say “how many books have you written” and that was way before I expressed any interest in writing. There’s a stereotype of Ghanaian immigrants, children of African immigrants, or immigrants in general that have a thing . . . and my parents prove that to be very true. It might even be understated actually. They came valuing education, and they hate downtime. They hate to see their kids chilling, I think that’s what African parents hate the most, you know? So for me, I kind of grew up in that. But it’s hard for me to pick any one specific thing because it’s what I knew first.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I definitely agree with that. I was always doing more work after my own homework. Like writing my A-B-C’s in my notebook over and over again.
NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH: Yeah. In my writing—it’s in my book too—my dad really did tell us Anansi stories when we were in Queens. I’ve al- ways had that oral tradition, even though I hadn’t had a chance to go to Ghana. It made me feel like I was a part of something bigger or a part of a community, with all my aunties and uncles and everything. Even when I didn’t see them for a long time, I grew up feeling connected to a community.
Hannah Tinti is the author of the short story collection Animal Crackers (The Dial Press, 2004) and two best-selling novels: The Good Thief (2008) and The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley (2017). Her fiction has garnered many distinctions, including the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, the American Library Association’s Alex Award, and an Edgar Award nomination for Best Novel. As the co-founder, former editor-in-chief, and current executive editor of the award-winning magazine One Story, Tinti has also received extensive recognition for her editorial work, including the 2009 PEN/Nora Magid award for excellence in editing. She has taught creative writing at NYU, Columbia University, the Sirenland Writer’s Conference—which she co-founded in 2006—and elsewhere.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: You’re often asked about the darkness in your writ- ing, and there is a lot of graphic violence: hit men, domestic abuse, murder, dis- memberment. In The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley, we watch the protagonist take twelve bullets and dispense many more, we watch his teenage daughter break a boy’s finger, bust a widow’s head open, etc. But there’s also a lot of em- pathy in your work, for perpetrators of violence as well as for victims (and often these are the same characters). I’m interested in what draws you to violence as a subject, but also how you see the relationship between violence and empathy in fiction. Does the writing of violence ever feel emotionally difficult for you?
HANNAH TINTI: People are always curious about the dark side, and it’s an area of life I’m familiar with. I grew up in Salem, Massachusetts, where it’s pretty much Halloween 365 days a year. One of my first jobs was at a place called the Salem Witch Dungeon, which featured torture devices used on witches. I would dress in rags and a rubber mask and hide in the shadows, then jump out and scare people. I enjoyed this immensely. The mask I wore allowed a shy, quiet girl the opportunity to be someone else. Someone powerful. When I grew up, I learned to do this on the page. Fiction allows space to explore our fears. And that’s how it feels for me when I’m writing and I’m onto something good, like I’m groping through a pitch-black space with my hands, trying to find the walls and the furniture, and there is terror but also excitement in my chest. I don’t find violent scenes difficult to write, but it can sometimes be challenging to read them out loud to an audience. That’s when a sudden emotion can sneak out and surprise me, or the listeners. It’s like a spell being cast when I say the words out loud.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: So how did you make that transition from the Witch Dungeon to the literary spell? That is, how did you figure out that you wanted to be a writer?
HANNAH TINTI: I started off as a science major and loved that world but soon discovered that my brain was not built for numbers. While I reveled in the periodic table of elements, I could never seem to remember the atomic weight of xenon. Then, on a whim, I took a writing class with the author Blanche Boyd, and she made writing seem like the coolest thing in the universe. I found that I could take subjects that I was interested in, like animals and the natural world, and use them in a place where I had some talent, which was reading and writing. That’s when the spell truly took hold. I’ve been bewitched ever since.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: You have a real genius for plot and structure. It’s evident in the suspenseful Samuel Hawley, the episodic Good Thief, the taut stories of Animal Crackers, and in your feedback as a teacher and editor. Do you think this facility is innate? Is it integral to the way you think, or is it something you’ve learned over time, through writing, through editing?
HANNAH TINTI: I look for patterns in everything. And I suppose that’s how I first became interested in narrative structure. When a book or a story moves me, I want to figure out how the author did it. One way to approach this is to put it under an X-ray. Blanche Boyd, my first writing teacher, would have us choose a favorite story and then retype it. I’ve repeated this exercise many times since. It makes me examine a piece, sentence by sentence, down to the commas and semi- colons. And then I begin to see the framework. At the same time, when writing my own material, I hardly ever create in a linear fashion in the early drafts. In- stead the experience is more like an octopus, with many arms wriggling at once. I have visions of scenes, I write those scenes, and then I try and figure out how the pieces fit together. For The Good Thief, for example, I wrote the middle of the book first, then the beginning, and then the end. My friend the poet Kate Gray recently told me that this kind of thinking is connected to dyslexia (something I struggle with)—the jumbling of letters and numbers can also train the mind to decode structures and seek outside connections.
Join us this Friday for readings from Hannah Tinti and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah at 7PM.
