‘How grandma’s stories made me a writer’

Donald Ekpeki Oghenechovwe is 2019 winner of the Nommo Award for Best Speculative Short Story by an African for ‘The Witching Hour’. His novelette titled ‘The Diary of The Dark Child’ got an honourable mention in the second quarter of the Writers of the Future contest 2018. He was also winner of the Imbube creative […]

Donald Ekpeki Oghenechovwe is 2019 winner of the Nommo Award for Best Speculative Short Story by an African for ‘The Witching Hour’. His novelette titled ‘The Diary of The Dark Child’ got an honourable mention in the second quarter of the Writers of the Future contest 2018. He was also winner of the Imbube creative writing contest 2017. Here, he talks about making time to write, his award-winning story, and more.

Bookshelf: You were announced winner of the Nommo Award for Best Speculative Short Story for ‘The Witching Hour’. Did you expect to win?

Donald Ekpeki Oghenechovwe: I didn’t expect to win. I mean, I wanted to, hoped to, but I didn’t expect it. I think it would require a certain level of narcissism to expect it. A sense of entitlement, as if it were owed me. I was definitely happy and ecstatic though.

Bookshelf: What inspired ‘The Witching Hour’?

Oghenechovwe: The regular sleep paralysis experience everyone gets from time to time. There are usually stories that it’s from witches ‘pressing’ you and feeding on your life energy while sending you bad dreams and altering your destiny. There are a bit more ideas here and there, folklore from my grandma mixed in. Speaking of my grandma, I remember she used to treat us to the classic campfire storytelling experience. Back when I was younger, she would gather me and my siblings and tell us grand stories about a hero embarking on an adventure to magic lands to obtain hidden powers and facing countless spirits and supernatural obstacles. Much of the plot of these stories is lost now. Back then I didn’t think I was going to be a writer and be able to write this kind of fiction. It was in the early 1990s and I hadn’t heard of literary magazines, or African Speculative fiction. I would later read Ben Okri’s ‘The Famished Road’, Chukwu Emeka Ike’s ‘The Bottled Leopard’, Cyrian Ekwensi’s ‘An African Night’s Entertainment’ and other works that now fall under the genre. Still, African speculative fiction wasn’t a huge thing then. I think they were all grouped under literary fiction, and there wasn’t much of that kind of thing so it wasn’t something I thought I could write and have a medium to market. So asides the entertainment value of it, I didn’t have a reason to document those stories. There are all these magazines now publishing African speculative fiction and there’s the African Speculative Fiction Society (ASFS), a community of thriving writers founded by Geoff Ryman, who is one of the most awarded authors in the SFF genre. There’s the Nommo awards for best speculative fiction story by an African which I won the short story category of. But those stories are now gone, perhaps forever. At least I only have the simplest of them, ‘The Witching Hour’ I had to make do with. I think that much is lost when we lack mediums or systems to exploit them such that even after those systems are set up, what is lost is irrecoverable. This isn’t limited to storytelling alone. Perhaps in the sciences, medicine and the other fields, there is a lot that can be achieved, innovations and inventions being lost and irretrievably so because the people who should do those things lack the systems to enable them. Africa is a growing continent and I wish that more systems would be built like the ASFS, the Nommo and the Ake Festival where it was presented, more endeavours and sponsors and mediums set up to allow the youth population exploit all the knowledge and abilities they may possess before it’s irrevocably lost in the mist of time.

Bookshelf: How easy or challenging was it for you to build your story around the lives of witches?

Oghenechovwe: It was fairly easy. Witches are a thriving phenomenon in our society. Stories of them abound, either ‘pressing’ their enemies at night when they sleep, or being responsible for all the harm that befall us, from medical emergencies to bad governance. All the stories of wicked old women caught half transformed, trapped in half human and animal form, found on electric poles and other such tales. All I had to do was sift through our rich lore on witchcraft. In fact, there was too much material and I had difficulty in deciding what to leave out to allow what I was writing remain a short story of about three thousand words.

Bookshelf: In 2018 your novelette titled ‘The Diary of The Dark Child’ got an honourable mention in the second quarter of the Writers of the Future contest. Also, in 2017 you emerged winner of the Imbube creative writing contest 2017. How would you say winning all these awards, including the Nommo, has impacted on your work generally?

Oghenechovwe: You missed a few. Before all that, I won the Writer of the Year award in the Faculty of Law, University of Lagos and even earlier won an award and prize money as the best graduating Literature student and was dubbed the Wole Soyinka of my secondary school. I was also longlisted for the Nigerian Student Poetry Prize in 2017, I think. All these awards have sort of given me the feeling of being consistent and having an upward career trajectory and confidence that I am on an actual path. A writing career is sort of an undefined thing normally. At least to people watching the writer. They ask, what level are you at, what are you doing? What stage are you on, are you advancing, will it lead anywhere? They want to measure your progress with something tangible. Money, recognition, and if they can’t, they assume there isn’t any. The awards can be that for them, a scale to weigh writing on. This is what I am doing, this is where I am, and this is where I am going, this is how close or far I am to or from it. It doesn’t hurt me too I guess. I wouldn’t be entirely honest if I didn’t admit it was enjoyable having my work read and recognized as being of merit and getting some measure of attention from readers and fellow writers I admire. It does offer some validation.

Bookshelf: You studied law at the University of Lagos, and currently enrolled in the Nigerian Law School, Lagos campus, yet you write speculative fiction. What is your story?

Oghenechovwe: To be honest, I have always wanted to be a storyteller, or a hero if that failed. They say, write something worth reading, or do something worth writing. But reality struck. Every writer needs a day job, which should be something ‘professional’ and ‘lucrative,’ and every hero needs an alter ego, a disguise. So Law served those two purposes and I was a Law student by day, writer by night, and that’s literal. I mean I did travel by night bus, from Lagos to Enugu to attend the Nigerian Student Poetry Prize award ceremony so I could be back for school activities on time. I always tried to strike a balance between the two, which wasn’t easy. My mom always felt I didn’t do so well on the school front. She remarked when I got the Honourable Mention in the Writers of the Future contest that she thought my writing was a distraction from school and I had responded then that no, school was the distraction from writing. So she’s never really been a fan. But I did my best for it, I guess. I managed to graduate, write a few short stories while at it, win and be nominated for awards, write and sell a novella this year, which is slated for publication next year. I was also invited to edit an anthology.

Bookshelf: Have you considered exploring other genres?

Oghenechovwe: Yes, literary fiction, and I am an avid fan of historical fiction as well, which mixes well with speculative fiction. I did love reading historical fiction growing up and was an avid fan of Wilbur Smith. Though I read everything, from Clive Cussler to Ludlum, to Conan Doyle. I think in time I may explore these other genres more fully. For now it’s mainly speculative fiction, though I suppose a nonfiction work, a memoir is on the horizon somewhere.

Bookshelf: What are you working on at the moment?

Oghenechovwe: Right now I am doing world building and outlining for a series of novels I intend to write, set in the same world as my novella ‘Ife-Iyoku, the Tale of Imadeyunuagbon’. The novella is slated for publication next year in Dominion, an anthology of speculative fiction from Africa and the African diaspora. The world they are both set in is a post-apocalyptic one where nearly all life in the African continent has been wiped out following a nuclear war. The continent is curtained off to contain the radiation and other harmful effects of the event. The few survivors are forced to evolve and develop powers to help them survive in the harsh and twisted environment. The series, a trilogy will be titled ‘The Orisha Cycle’ and the  books in it will be ‘Birth of Orisha’, ‘War of Orisha’, and ‘Death of Orisha’.