‘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.
‘The anglophone world, we have to infer, has run out of words for its own feelings.’
Daisy Hildyard on the wisdom of scarecrows.
‘What is the read receipt for?’
Lillian Fishman on texting, power and the ethics of leaving a friend on read.
‘Like pretty much everyone who uses the internet, I have seen many terrible things that I did not search for and that I cannot unsee.’
Rosanna McLaughlin on what the internet thinks she wants.
‘I have a pathological addiction to the internet, which I indulge with the excuse of making art. It rarely translates to anything good and mostly leaves me overstimulated and afraid.’
Paul Dalla Rosa on excess and the internet.
‘rumors of bees on speedwell, / no oxidative stress just / effortless pollination’
Two poems by Sylvia Legris.
‘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.
‘Every time I tried to write more, it turned out to be a fruitless endeavor – I felt like I was trapped in a sealed room with no windows.’
Fiction by Yu Hua, translated by Michael Berry.
‘I think there should be a National Service of Hospitality. The best way to see the true face of humanity is to serve it a plate of chips.’
Camilla Grudova on bad-mannered customers.
