A Conversation with PEN America Best Debut Short Story Author Angela Ajayi

“I wrote almost euphorically, allowing my memories, my knowledge, and my imagination to meld endlessly, freely.”

On August 22, Catapult will publish PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2017, the inaugural edition of an anthology celebrating outstanding new fiction writers published by literary magazines around the world. In the weeks leading up to publication, we’ll feature a Q&A with the contributors, whose stories were selected for the anthology by judges Marie-Helene Bertino, Kelly Link, and Nina McConigley, and awarded PEN’s Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Submissions for the 2018 awards are open now.

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Angela Ajayi’s essays, book reviews, and author interviews have appeared in The Common online, Wild River Review, Star Tribune, and Afroeuropa: Journal of Afroeuropean Studies. She spent more than ten years in publishing, mainly as a book editor at Africa World Press/The Red Sea Press. She holds a BA in English literature from Calvin College and an MA in comparative literature from Columbia University. Recently she was selected for the 2016-2017 Loft Mentor Series in fiction. Nigerian and Ukrainian by birth and American by citizenship, she lives in Minneapolis with her husband and daughter. Her dream-like story, “Galina,” takes place in an exclusion zone near a nuclear power plant in Ukraine.

The first day Galina had visited her mother, she had killed a swallow with her car. It had happened a mile from the checkpoint. She had driven through Shramkovka, past the general store where she used to buy fresh bread and chunks of sweet halvah. The store stood empty, its windows clouded over with dust. She had come upon Baba Dasha’s house, a stone’s throw from the store, abandoned. Then Galina had driven out of the small town and onto the tarred highway. Alongside her, the fields that were once filled with wheat, usually bent by the wind, were overgrown with weeds. As she neared her mother’s village, she had been relieved to see that the forest of fir trees that lined part of the road looked unchanged. She maneuvered the car onto the muddy road that led to her mother’s house, and it struck her that the road appeared less ugly with fewer tire marks.

The Shurkas’ house was barely hanging on—its windows dust-filled, its thatched roof caving in, the windows still lined with a few possessions that were left behind in the hasty evacuation. Outside the house, a sandpit, in which Galina had played as a child, was strewn with plastic toys. She remembered her childhood, when the summer days had been bright and long and filled with playing or fishing by the pond behind their house. She would climb trees or run through cornfields, emerging flushed and winded. It had been a joyful time until the summer she was thirteen, when her father died of a heart attack on a train.

Her mother had howled into the night, beating the floor with her fists. “My Vityok, not my Vityok!”

And yet with each new day, Galina and her mother had fed the chickens, fetched the warm eggs from the coop, and tied the cow out to pasture at the break of dawn. Then fall had come with its wetness, its decaying leaves. Then winter with its snow, falling on her father’s grave underneath a cherry tree in a cemetery overgrown with weeds and cobwebs. The years had passed by, and when she was old enough, she had moved to Kiev where she had met Umaru, a Nigerian student studying international politics at the university. It hadn’t been long before they married and moved to Nigeria, into an old colonial house and into a life of leisure, of expats, of cultural coagulation that would result only in heartbreak.

In the car, the thought of her past, which was still a fresh wound, caused Galina’s heart to beat faster. She gripped the steering wheel tighter and accelerated into the path of a swallow. The bird catapulted upward and landed on the road in front of her.

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Catapult Books: You’ve written a lot of nonfiction. What was it like to switch to short story? What inspired the change?

Angela Ajayi: For as long as I can remember, I was convinced that I couldn’t write fiction well, but I still dabbled in it, mainly focusing on nonfiction. In 2015, while working on some linked essays about my childhood in Nigeria and Ukraine, I checked some of my memories against those of my mother’s and discovered that there were some misrepresentations on my part. I was quite shaken by this discovery so much so that I put the essays aside to regain my composure. At my husband’s encouragement, I tried short fiction more fully this time. There was suddenly no all-consuming fear about accuracy or getting it just right or embarrassing myself and others, and I wrote almost euphorically, allowing my memories, my knowledge, and my imagination to meld endlessly, freely.

The threads within the story—motherhood, gardens, infertility, radioactivity, death—entwine and amplify each other so effortlessly. Where did you get the idea to join these together?

I originally conceived of the story as an exploration of gender and racial issues within the meeting of two cultures, in this case, Nigerian and Ukrainian. More specifically, I wanted to write a story about the lives of Russian and Ukrainian women who married Nigerian men during the height of the Cold War and returned to live with their husbands in Nigeria. As a child of parents who did exactly this, I spent a lot of time around these women, and eventually, as I aged I became fascinated by how they navigated a culture that was often very welcoming to them but was also patriarchal, rife with sexism.

When I began writing, the story demanded specificity—a village in Ukraine, inspired by my own childhood memories of orchards and gardens there; a character not unlike some of those Russian and Ukrainian women grappling with loss—heartbreak, infertility, rejection; a maternal character who was as strong-willed as the old women I met when I spent summers in Ukraine. The theme of death recurred out of my own obsessions and the story’s inherent need for it—and Holly Morris’s fascinating film, The Babushkas of Chernobyl provided the seed for the setting, an area deemed uninhabitable due to high levels of radioactivity. So in the end, the specific had subsumed the general, though I hope the story still manages to address issues of race and gender.

After her mother’s accident, Galina stops worrying about her mother—and then is surprised when her mother does die. Why did you choose this ending?

The original ending did not include Galina’s mother’s death. It leaned more in the direction of Galina experiencing a breakthrough, but this was not explicit enough. In conversations with Guest Editor Rachel Swearingen at Fifth Wednesday Journal, it was obvious that the story felt unfinished, and we went back and forth on a couple of possible endings. Rachel then sent me an essay on how Chekhov often ended his stories and said “I think you have something Chekhovian going on in this story, read the essay and see if you can find some of his short stories to read again.” So I did exactly that, and I rewrote the ending, pushing the story forward and redirecting the reader’s focus out of scene a bit. She loved it.

Why did you place the bird in the beginning of the story?

When I visited Ukraine as a child, I distinctly remember seeing barn swallows flying in and out of my grandparents’ barn in the village, busy building nests and relying on this human-made enclosure for survival. As I wrote “Galina,” I wondered how a devastating nuclear blast would affect the lives of these birds—people were suddenly absent, human-made structures were crumbling, devoid of domesticated animal life—and so I imagined swallows flitting around, a bit displaced and disoriented, like the character Galina herself which is why it made sense to put it in the beginning.

How long did it take you to write the story?

I’d say three months, but the revision process took much longer.

How has the Robert J. Dau Prize affected you?

Where once I found myself in virtual obscurity as a fiction writer, I suddenly felt like a literary star when I won the prize. It has been an incredible boost to my confidence as a writer and my visibility.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on a collection of stories. I’d love to begin work on a novel as well.

Finally, where do you discover new writing?

I’m addicted to reading book reviews online. (I also write them occasionally for the Minneapolis Star Tribune.) I keep a diverse list of books that interest me while reading reviews, and when there’s time I purchase them to read.