Facilitator’s Notes:
Creative writing workshops have been cornerstones in my writing life: a defining one for me, thirteen years ago, hosted by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Farafina Creative Writing Workshop, gave me the precious gift of life-long readers; so, after selling my debut novel The Tiny Things are Heavier, I was moved to host a creative writing workshop for young Nigerian writers. For eight weeks in the months of August and September 2023, we workshopped and talked about fiction technique, welcomed guest speakers, traded writerly stories.
I’ve taught creative writing in different capacities for six years, and I’ve been in workshops for longer, and I can say for sure that the most important aspect of leading a workshop, especially of young people, is ensuring that whatever light they bring into the classroom continues to burn long after the class has ended. There’s no greater evidence of this light than in these short stories. In the past months, each writer has revisited their story eagerly, hungrily. Evidently talented, these writers, passionate, diligent, and endlessly curious about the craft of fiction.
Before you read these stories, I’d like to spend a little time discussing the kernel, the hot center, of each of them. We begin with Ikpe’s “Not Like Other Boys”. Here, Ikpe employs the Gatsby-ian technique of mirroring characters. Our narrator is the camera. The new boy in class, Vincent, is the focus. Vincent is a victim to several homophobic assaults by the class boys. “Speak up,” our narrator tells Vincent after one of such incidents. But really, our narrator is talking to himself. In the end, the triumph is not for the oppressors.
In Mgbodichinma’s “Back to Base”, a story about a young woman who works as a costumed performer, we meet another character who refuses to go down without a fight. This story does everything right. First, of course, by giving the character a job (stories of characters without jobs leave me perplexed), and not just any job, this specific Nigerian job of a costumed performer. On my first read, I immediately was buoyed back to the parties I attended as a child, the many costumed performers donning heavy costumes, slogging about in Lagos’ terrifying heat. It never occurred to me that one of the performers could have been a woman, on her period, in pain. This story marries this peculiar situation with the contemporary hopelessness of a young Nigerian living in poverty. Wretched as she is, hunted by several societal forces on the day the story happens, our heroine is not a passive one. She fights for her job. She attacks a man who assaults her. In the end, kicked here and there, she’s only momentarily defeated. We know this because she has shown us who she is. She has shown us that she’ll do whatever it takes to survive. What else better embodies the Nigerian spirit?
Vin-Añuonye’s “Are You Still Reading This”, a story about unrequited love, generous in its honesty and easy humor, is written in a believable epistolary form. There’s not a corner this story refuses to enter. We find shame, desperation, carnality. We also find a mind surprised at itself: that human condition of knowing better and doing worse. Here, our narrator brings a Nigerian campus to life, with all its joys and terrors, through characters so alive one suspects that if one turns sideways, they’ll find the characters standing next to them, seething with self-inflicted agonies. The narrator’s love interest, for instance, is sprawling in his complexity: wounding, concerned only with his pleasures, but also filled with quiet yearnings. Why else does he seek for more and more? And the narrator’s only school friend, a boisterous young woman, who speaks in no uncertain words about the love interest after he tries to involve her in his endless web of desires. If you’ve attended a Nigerian campus, you have met this character archetype. She’s friends with all the professors. Students in the class ahead are fond of her. She has all the handouts, even the ones you didn’t know existed. She gets all As. Is always mysteriously caught up in class wars, but never at the center. A bit of peacemaker and a bit of a terror. And she tops it all with a wicked sense of style.
This is what all three writers bring to us: news of our own world, our own selves, for they are writers who live amongst us.
Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo
Tallahassee, Florida (2025)
The Selected Works
Not Like Other Boys | Josiah Ikpe
Isele Magazine 