‘I think sometimes that when things are really explained to you, you kind of cheat someone from experiencing a deeper feeling.’
Vanessa Onwuemezi talks about her book Dark Neighbourhood.
In 2022 Vanessa Onwuemezi spoke to editor Josie Mitchell about Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring, sitting with strangeness and the joy of trying out new sounds on the page.
Vanessa Onwuemezi is a writer and poet living in London, her story ‘At the Heart of Things’ won the White Review Short Story Prize in 2019. Her debut story collection, Dark Neighbourhood, was published in 2021 by Fitzcarraldo Editions.
Read ‘Cuba’, a short story from Dark Neighbourhood, here.
‘We meet at various points in the great swathes of the past that neither of us were alive to witness.’
Allen Bratton on a daytrip to a castle with his older boyfriend.
‘Listening to three white poets, whom I suspect are academics, talk about the state of poetry.’
Oluwaseun Olayiwola eavesdrops on an older generation.
‘I’d been dubious about his company at first.’
Sarah Moss on watching Shakespeare with her twelve-year-old son.
‘She didn’t trust us because, to her, tenants were like children.’
Kate Zambreno on negotiating with her older landlady.
‘A moment now swallowed in embarrassment, I asked a question only a young person might ask an older one.’
Lynne Tillman on trying to understand what makes a generation.
‘Words only point to experience, they can’t replace it.’
Vanessa Onwuemezi and Colin Herd discuss UFOs, relation, and the search for an inner sense of home.
‘Brother, to be your sister is to confront the possibility of having been other than I am.’
Vanessa Onwuemezi on the meaning of sisterhood.
‘The hotel is pink all over, as the bitten inside of her mouth, as her dark father’s radiant bottom lip’.
A story by Vanessa Onwuemezi, from her collection Dark Neighbourhood.
‘You are what you do, and you are what you write, to some extent, I believe that at least.’
Lauren Oyler on personality, intention and the collapse between private and authorial selves.
‘How far can one deviate from the accepted pieties before one is kicked out?’
Brandon Taylor on naturalism and the future of fiction.
‘It’s hard to imagine a country where a lockdown would function perfectly, but in the case of Japan, which lacks basic individualism, the current situation has bred insidious hatred and division.’
