The Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute (BMI) will host a reading and conversation with Nigerian writer ‘Pemi Aguda at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 29 at the Beverly Theater. The reading will be followed by a conversation with Delight Ejiaka, a writer and MFA student in the UNLV Creative Writing International Program.

The event is free with RSVP and open to the public.

’Pemi Aguda is a writer from Lagos, Nigeria. Her debut short story collection, Ghostroots, was a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award in fiction. She is an MFA graduate from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. Her writing has been published in Granta, Ploughshares, Zoetrope: All-Story, and other publications, and has been awarded the O. Henry Prize for Short Fiction.

Aguda discussed her work, her writing process, and her best thrifting tips with Sada Malumfashi, an MFA student in the UNLV Creative Writing International Program, and BMI’s Joshua Chévere Cohen. The conversation was edited for length and clarity.

Sada Malumfashi: There is this consistent female character in Ghostroots, especially mothers, that take up a main character space in some of the stories. How do you go about writing such complexity of the Nigerian mother, that I rarely see in books, especially in Nigerian books?

'Pemi Aguda: So, for me, I'm a Nigerian woman, right? It's about writing what I'm interested in, but also what's accessible to me. So, looking around at the women who raised me. The women who are in my circles interest me. It's sad that you find it unusual that women are centered this way. It's true that it's the reality, but it's sad that's the reality. 

But, when I went about writing the stories I wasn't necessarily thinking, oh, I'm writing to fill a gap, or I'm writing to address this wrong. I started from what interested me and the women in my life, and the women around me, and the women whose stories I was reading were fascinating, complex people. And so, of course, the stories had to take their lives seriously.

Sada Malumfashi: Most of the stories in Ghostroots are set in Lagos, Nigeria, with movement towards Abuja, or some peripheral cities or towns outside of that. How did Lagos come to be a central setting? 

'Pemi Aguda: I'm a Lagos girl. I grew up in Lagos. I've been in Lagos my whole life. I'm just endlessly fascinated by the city, you know. It's chaotic. It's full of stories. I'm inspired every time I go out into the street, every time I talk to somebody.

I did my national youth service in Abuja for one year. So, I also have a relationship with that city, and I lived there again in 2020 for like six months. But Lagos is my jam. I think Lagos is fascinating. Lagos confuses me, but also I feel like I understand it, you know? I think it's such a rich — I was going to say setting, but it's not a setting anymore. It enacts so much and evokes so much from the people who live in it that it's its own thing.

It's its own force and I guess that force also acted on me, and I had to write about it. I had to write about Lagos.

Sada Malumfashi: How did you envision your readers to interact with your settings, especially so many that take place in the unique marketplace of Lagos, which might not be completely familiar to readers outside Nigeria?

'Pemi Aguda: Hmm! That's not something I really thought about. I don't necessarily think about readers while I'm writing. I might send it to a few friends and say, make sure that I'm not over-explaining things to a Nigerian, because that's important to me. I don't want to suddenly be explaining what Banga soup is to a Nigerian.

But I think if you're writing well, or if you're writing a place well enough, people don't necessarily need to be familiar with it to understand. It's a market, which is a universal thing. Everybody has seen a version of a market. People buy and people sell, and so everything else after that is just detail, and I think that if the details are grounded enough, then a reader should be able to follow from sentence to sentence, even if they don't understand what one word means, surely, by the context of the sentence itself, or what stands beside it, then they can.

I think just going into the details, like sensory details, but also physical details, atmospheric details, when people are just plunged into a visceral experience of a place, then it doesn't necessarily need to be familiar with them. Once they can connect with those feelings that are familiar, then, where they are, where these characters are being set doesn't have to be familiar.

Sada Malumfashi: One story that I keep thinking about is “24, Alhaji Williams Street.” I was reading this on a flight, and I had to close the book because I felt the horror vividly. I'm really interested in your process of creating such effects as a storyteller.

'Pemi Aguda: It's interesting because I don't necessarily think of that story in particular as horrific, but I do understand that it can be. The premise is unsettling.

I was just teaching a class about uncanny realities with One Story magazine, and we were talking about how to foment the feeling of dread in fiction. A friend of mine, Nishanth Injam, we read one of his stories, and one of the things he said was to abstract the dread, you know, or abstract the fear or the danger. So when you're not quite sure what it is that is wrong, it adds to that feeling of being unsettled.

I also think there's something about a story like “24, Alhaji Williams Street,” where straight up, you know, what is going to happen, or you know the danger is set up in the beginning, and so everything that comes after is just one person waiting for it to come to them. And I think there's something about that waiting, there's something about the horror in knowing or not knowing, like something horrible is looming and coming toward you. So just like sitting in that space of can I do something? Can I get out of this? Will I get out of this? Just not knowing is one of the things that I think makes that story in particular feel maybe unsettling.

I think I prefer it when a story is really grounded in reality, but then there's just one thing that's askew. I think when a person doubts their reality, there's space for interesting things to happen in the story but also in the interior of a character. So I tend to go towards that kind of more subtle, disorienting, uneasy feeling than the straight up horror.

Sada Malumfashi: One story in which women were not central characters is “Things Boys Do,” but in the same manner, you flip the gender narrative in that these are men now taking care of children, which, in the ordinary Nigerian way, men leave the women to do all of the childcaring. What are your thoughts around that flipping of the gender narrative in that story?

'Pemi Aguda: I think for that story in particular, I was inspired by murder mysteries. I love to watch murder mysteries, and I think there's an interesting way of something playing out from a specific decision or a specific act in the past. But people always act as if the past won't come back to haunt them, right? I knew this story was going to be about three men who had done something in their past. There's a line towards the end where you don't know where haunting ends and paranoia begins. I like that murkiness.

I'm always interested in stories where you can say it's either supernatural or psychological. So in a story like this, I wanted to think about the space of paranoia versus the space of ‘are these children really haunting their fathers’? Or are the fathers just paranoid because they've suppressed something they did in the past and in the process of doing that I realized, I don't want the mothers-to-be to be involved in this. Let these men face what they did by themselves.

And so, in a way, I guess maybe I was also saving the women by removing them from the situation, and then the consequence of that is that we get a story where there are three men who are single fathers, or, you know, acting in that role, but then it also became a story about what happens when the father becomes that person who does primary care in the house. In a way, you can see the story like that as its own horror, when they suddenly see they're confronting the things that women have to confront all the time.

Sada Malumfashi: In your writing, I see the societal influence from Nigeria of course, but I was also thinking of what literary influences you have especially around this genre that you write in.

'Pemi Aguda: There are many. From Nigeria, I love Lesley Nneka Arimah's work. I'm a big fan. When I was younger, I read Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come for the first time and I was like, wow! Here is a book that is centered around a Nigerian woman, which isn't to take away from the stories that depict our reality such as Second Class Citizen, or Flora Nwapa’s books. But something that was special about Everything Good Will Come was that this was a woman who was not doing the things that society wanted. She was a disobedient woman, and I think that was very formative for me to read at the time. 

Beyond the shores of Nigeria, I read a lot of people that I call the strange girlies, these female authors who write speculative fiction. I'm thinking of Han Kang, Yoko Ogawa, or like Samanta Schweblin, Mariana Enriquez, Shirley Jackson. I think there's this host of women who ride into strangeness that I feel very moved by. Edwidge Danticat, too, I remember reading Krik? Krak! as a teenager, and that's also a book that centers women, and it was very, very good to see how women and their daughters and their granddaughters, like how this flow of life is explored, just in the mundane, day-to-day things that happen in the kitchen.

Sada Malumfashi: I was discussing Ghostroots with my wife, and she mentioned that your book makes someone want to be creative. What advice do you have for readers who are engaging with Ghostroots in a creative manner?

'Pemi Aguda: They should be free. They should do whatever they want. That makes me very happy. Actually, I love to read something that just moves me either intellectually, but also sometimes, just, really, physically or viscerally, or that makes me start thinking. I just finished reading this book called Model Home by Rivers Solomon, and the whole time I was like somebody please make this into a movie because I was engaging with it on such a visual level. I don't think that I am in the place to advise anybody about that, but people should please be moved, however they want to be moved and should give into it.

Joshua Cohen: Congratulations on being a finalist for the National Book Award. What was that day like for you? How did you find out? Did your phone blow up?

'Pemi Aguda: A friend sent me a screenshot that morning. She was the first, and it was like you’re on this long list, and I was like, what? First of all, I did not think I was eligible for this prize. I didn't realize that a couple of years ago they had expanded the eligibility to include books that are published in the United States, but not necessarily by people who have citizenship.

It didn't even occur to me that it would be a possibility. So that was the first jarring thing, and I think I was just grateful, because I know a few authors on the long list and the short list who I have admired for a long time. It was just a little bit bonkers that a short story collection of mine, my first book, was being honored that way. It still is unbelievable.

I think it didn't really hit me until the finalist reading in New York, in November, when I got on stage with Percival Everett and Kaveh Akbar. I was like whoa! I guess I am one of the five people who are on this list. I'm just grateful that people who wouldn't have found the book before now are reading it. That, I think, is the biggest thing for me.

Joshua Cohen: Your outfits for the finalist reading and the awards ceremony were incredible, by the way. Tell us about the looks.

'Pemi Aguda: Oh, this is hilarious. Well, the gray one I found at a thrift store actually, because I love thrifting, and I love the constraints of a thrift store, finding something and then making it work. So I found that suit, and then I took it to a tailor, and then it worked out. I actually bought a dress for the awards ceremony, and it didn't work out. What I eventually wore was my backup plan, but I think it was the right thing.

Joshua Cohen: Do you have a thrift store pro tip you can share with us?

'Pemi Aguda: I always shop in the men's section. That's my tip. I think — nobody hate me — but the men's clothes just seem to be better made. I would tell people to go outside of their comfort zone in a thrift store especially because it's not expensive. You can afford to be more edgy, or get something that you wouldn't typically get.

When you run your hand down a rack, there's a thing — this is a silly conversation — but this thing about your eyes looking for color but your hands looking for texture. Maybe that's my advice. Color, texture.