WISLY #1

The Marathon

I’m doing this now, while I still love you.

That’s not to say I won’t love you anytime soon. I still love your older sibling four years later. They changed my life in ways both material and spiritual. The book that came before you, is why people, more often than not, pronounce my name correctly after twenty-six year of not. Because of your older sibling, hosts ask, quick and panicked, moments before they’re set to introduce me on stage at an East Coast Campus auditorium, or orchestral hall in Sydney, or my former high school, or in independent bookstores all around the country how to pronounce Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. That book, you’re elder, my first, is called, Friday Black, and I still love them, but not the way I did before, and that’s fine. Love, I think, is a process, a hike, a river, whatever.

You were actually supposed to be a part of Friday Black. That is, you, what is now the creative project I’m most proud of felt for many years like a failure. Yes, italicized failure. (Sidebar : I almost never use italics to create a stress or emphasis because my first real writing professor Lynne Tillman told me it was essentially amateurish. I internalized that for the most part and I don’t disagree even though I know many writers who use it that way beautifully. I think what she was saying was that let the language create any and all effects, not the type font. I am diverging from this sage advice here and now though because something about this medium feels like it allows it. Idk. Sorry.) But yeah italicized emphasis because I’m not sure it’s clear how much different all this could have been. I’m really interested, as you know, in how we hold each other, in the idea and practice of Justice and, despite so much, Love. I think that’s what you are about, Love I mean, and for a lot or reasons, when I started you, I just wasn’t ready to see you through. Your existence is proof that I’ve grown and for that I am more than grateful. For that I love you.

There are some simple questions I’d like to get out of the way. Questions I can imagine being asked over and over. They won’t make me love you less, but they’ll turn certain aspects of your existence into a kind of chore. I’ll answer them so often the truth will become automated, so even if what I’m saying is real, it will feel false, to me. And then, I’ll forget, maybe wonder if I’m exactly telling the truth, hoping more than professing. I say this assuming people will care to ask, which is a huge privilege. I don’t take that for granted, I’m just saying. I’ll do a few of these leading up to your release and maybe a few after. I don’t know.

That said, here, while I still love you, are some answers:

How has it been going from Story Collection to Novel? (or some version of this question.)

I’ve said I started my writing career with a story collection. But that wasn’t my first book. My very first book as a kinda YA adventure about REDACTED CAUSE I MIGHT PUT IT OUT LATER. But in finishing it at the age of 19, I discovered that I could will my way to the completion of a project. It was terrible, the book I mean, but at the time it was the hope of my life. I finished it of it on a Red Roover Vaccum box that served as a desk in an apartment my family would eventually be evicted from. I stole Wi-Fi from the family downstairs, just enough to load J. Cole’s Can’t Cry on YouTube and listen obsessively between furious bouts of writing. I wrote it and as I sent a letter to Poets and Writers asking them if they wanted to give me money for a serial/epistolary series in which they could document my ascent from boy to a WRITER. I never heard back from them.

But I wrote that first book before I had developed a real reading practice, before I had properly gained a writing mentor.

I wrote Friday Black, though, under the wings of names who have become almost holy to me. People who invested deeply in my growth. Lynne Tillman, Dana Spiotta, Arthur Flowers, Mary Karr, Chris Kennedy, Bruce Smith, George Saunders and many, many more. I wrote it as I was becoming an adult. From 2012-2018 I was figuring out what kind of writer I might be and more importantly what I wanted to stand for as a human being. But more than any of that, I was very hurt, very angry. I felt my family had been given an unfair, untenable situation and for whatever reason I thought I could fix that with writing. Over the years that situation was depersonalized and I realized that at large our country/society/world is both unfair and untenable and that became the crux of so much of my work.

Today I made the (I thought) the mistake of being in Manhattan after the NYC marathon. So many humans cloaked in their blue hoodcapes of accomplishment. Medals on their chests. Families and friends gathered. It is a perhaps overused metaphor: difficult/arduous things being “Marathons.” Marathon is endurance, marathon is Pheidippides running 150 miles to tell a story of victory, Marathon is a family cheering curbside, armed with cowbells and smiles screaming, as their daughter, blonde, fatigued, in her blue cape of conquered miles arrives to cheers and thrusts herself into her their arms. A scene so sincere and beautiful, I almost had to look away. Her mother held a hand drawn sign that read: My Hero is my DAUGHTER!

Writing a novel is like a marathon. A super marathon, you took me seven years to write. When started I was twenty three ish. Now I’m thirty-one by the time this comes out, if it comes out, I’ll be thirty-two, probably. Writing a novel feels like swimming with no shore in sight. It’s like climbing a mountain. It evokes all these physical metaphors because it requires endurance. It’s also a faith practice. It asks you to believe in something that doesn’t exist anywhere but in you. It asks you to summon that which doesn’t exist out into this dimension for the world to see. It’s fucking terrifying. Short stories are terrifying as well. They demand precision, they are tight these are all things I hope you are too. (Future Nana here to remind you *the reader* that when I say *you* here I mean the novel that at that time as unpublished called Chain-Gang All-Stars. Just chiming in in case you’ve lost that thread. ) But what feels different is although many people say the short story is much more unforgiving than the novel, and I don’t think they’re wrong, I have many, many stories which had failed. I don’t italicize for emphasis here because it doesn’t hurt that bad. Like there is a graveyard of dead stories on my old Lenovo. But for me, stories often die gracefully and with dignity. That is to say, they don’t go kicking and screaming like my first novel did. They trust they will be reborn, again, anew, as you did. So in that sense, you, before you were a novel, the failed short story of the same title, were very generous, because you let me kill you so you might become what you are today.

So to answer the question: Writing a novel after a collection is scary. In my heart of hearts I think the short form resonates with so much of my artistic person there is short-story in my blood. I think I’ve had to grow comfortable with writing as a prolonged faith act. I’ve had to walk blindly, for years. The novel, you, for me has been trying to do something you know you can’t do at the outset because you trust that the work will grow you enough to see it through.

And you did that, and for that I love you.