Literary Arts

By Olivia Kozlevcar

This article was first published on October 4, 2022 in Washington Independent Review of Books here.

Magic Is Murder, a new story collection sourced from the talented members of the Chesapeake Chapter of Sisters in Crime (SinC), offers a thrilling, modern blend of mystery and the supernatural. Here, Donna Andrews, one of the anthology’s editors, shares a peek at the collection and the people behind it.

As you and your colleagues mention in your editors’ note, the overarching theme of the anthology is crime. What drove you in this direction?

What drove us was that we’re all crime writers. Magic Is Murder is the latest in a series that the editors — Barb Goffman, Marcia Talley, and I — have done to showcase the wealth of writing talent in the Chesapeake Chapter of Sisters in Crime. SinC is an organization founded in 1986 by a group of women crime writers who wanted to combat misogyny in publishing. They saw that women were at least half the readers in the mystery genre, but women weren’t getting half of the publishing contracts — and when they were published, they weren’t paid as much as male writers and didn’t receive as many reviews or award nominations. So they set out to level the playing field.

Marcia, Barb, and I are all longtime SinC members — in fact, Marcia is a past president of SinC National, Barb and I are both past chapter presidents, and we’re all three still active in the chapter. Although the anthology isn’t an official chapter publication, we limit submissions to chapter members, and we donate to the chapter any royalties generated after the publisher pays the contributors.

It’s been a rewarding project. Over the years, quite a few writers have had their first professional publication in the anthology series, including several who have gone on to thriving careers in publishing. We like to think that it’s a good opportunity for relatively new writers, appearing beside more established authors in a successful anthology series — successful and award-winning. Stories from the first nine volumes in the series have won the Agatha, Anthony, Derringer, and Macavity awards — in fact, a total of eight awards and 20 additional nominations. In short, the anthologies have done pretty well so far, and we like to keep building on that.

The collection also combines the dual themes of magic and murder. Why this subgenre?

We like to choose a theme for each anthology — past volumes have included Invitation to Murder (stories must involve an invitation); Fur, Feathers, and Felonies (stories must involve an animal); and Storm Warning (stories must involve the weather). Wildside Press, our publisher since the third volume in the series, likes the thematic approach — it definitely helps give each book a distinctive identity, which helps with sales and marketing. We editors think having a different theme for each anthology helps spark our contributors’ imagination. And we hope it’s fun for the reader, seeing the wonderful variety you can get when you turn a bunch of very different writers loose on the same theme.

When we chose magic and murder as the theme for the latest anthology, we did so because we know that these days, genre-blending is very popular. There was a time when many mystery readers disapproved of crime stories that involved magic or the supernatural, but today they’re one of the bestselling subgenres in the field. And we were also hoping to get a few crossover sales from fantasy readers.

Why is this collection meaningful to you?

Apart from the fact that having a book out never gets old, Magic Is Murder represents a milestone. Our team has been putting out an anthology every two years, and this is the 10th volume in the series. And yes, we only do this every two years because we like to give our contributors plenty of time to create and polish their stories — and give ourselves plenty of time to do the editorial and pre-publication work, because we do this as volunteers on top of our own busy careers in crime writing. So, the release of this volume marks two decades of working to shine a light on the talented writers of our local chapter — and producing anthologies that we are proud to present to mystery readers.

Now that the anthology is out, what’s next?

We’re already hard at work on the next volume, Three Strikes — You’re Dead! All the stories in that volume will feature sports. And we’re also pretty busy with our own writing careers. Barb is highly in demand as a freelance developmental editor on top of her career as a multiple-award-winning short-story writer — her work has appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and dozens of anthologies. Marcia is also a prolific short-story writer, and Severn House recently released Disco Dead, the 19th book in her Hannah Ives mystery series. And I’m currently working on what will be the 33rd book in my Meg Langslow series — number 31, Round Up the Usual Peacocks, came out in August, and number 32, Dashing Through the Snowbirds, will be out in October. In short, what’s next for all of us is a lot more crime…but only on paper.

[Editor’s note: This article was written with support from the DC Arts Writing Fellowship, a project of the nonprofit Day Eight.]

Olivia Kozlevcar is an undergraduate at American University who dreams of pursuing law. She is currently the Life managing editor of the American University Eagle, as well as one of the hosts of its podcast, District of Cinema. Follow her online at @oliviakozlevcar.

By Olivia Kozlevcar

This article was first published in Washington Independent Review of Books here.

Given our current political climate, it’s hard to imagine writing DC-themed fiction that’s stranger than truth, but Joe Rothstein has done just that in his new novel, The Moment of Menace: The Future Looks Glorious…Unless We All Die First. Rothstein, whose long career spans both politics and literature, braids the two worlds together in a riveting story that gives readers a glimpse of what our democracy could become — for better or worse.  

Your deep knowledge of politics comes through in this book. Is it challenging writing fictional stories about a very real system?

Think about what it means to be a candidate. Depending on the political office at stake, you will need to raise considerable campaign money, much of it by personally asking friends, family, co-workers, strangers. In a real sense, you will have to learn to beg. You will have to hire a professional staff and recruit dozens, hundreds, possibly thousands of volunteers, a hugely difficult exercise in high-pressure management. You will need to appear in public every day, sometimes in the media, weighing every word lest it be misinterpreted, often purposely, by the opposition.

Tension will increase as Election Day approaches, whether the polls have you ahead or behind. The money won’t be enough. The attacks on your character will increase, all in public media. Your family will feel under siege. You will get conflicting advice. Every day, you will need to make decisions, any one of which could cause you to win or lose the election. This is stuff of high drama, and I lived it through more than 200 campaigns. Marriages were…destroyed, so were reputations, wealth, hopes, and dreams. I don’t need to use my imagination to develop characters and situations. I just need to remember.

Your novel follows a charismatic American president named Isabel Aragon Tennyson. How did you shape this character? 

During my campaign career, I met many strong, capable, and courageous women: candidates, spouses, campaign leaders, and others. We’ve never elected a woman president. I decided that I would, and that she would be a composite of many women I met who would have made great real-life presidents.

This book is as much a dystopian novel as a thriller. Do you find it difficult to approach the dystopia genre without being overly pessimistic?

I’m a democrat with both a small and capital D. But democracy is struggling to effectively meet the challenges of the 21st century. And because democracy is underperforming, anti-democratic forces are presenting a serious challenge. It’s essential to recognize and meet this challenge. So, I write not as a purveyor of doom but rather with a call to action. Rather than write essays about this, I’ve chosen to write entertaining thrillers and wrap them around real public problems.

What does waiting to write until you’ve gained some life experience bring to the resulting work?

Perspective. The curved edges of “good” and “evil” and “right” and “wrong.” Living through chapters of life to see many of them resolve, gaining insight from experience.

What’s next for you?

One of my summer-vacation jobs in college was with an automobile stunt show, sort of a car circus of smashed cars, daredevil motorcyclists, and a finale with a car and driver being shot out of a cannon. We traveled the country as the Motor Olympics. I was “Suicide Saunders.” That’s my next book.

By Morgan Musselman

 This article was first published in The DC Line here. This article was produced within the New Book Critics project, a component of Day Eight’s 2022 The Crisis in Book Review conference.

Three recently published poetry collections explore themes of loss, devotion and self-love, demonstrating the art form’s capacity to express the depth of the human experience. 

The Shomer by Ellen Sazzman; published in 2021 by Finishing Line Press (85 pages, $21.99)

A striking debut collection from poet Ellen Sazzman, The Shomer takes its title from the traditional Jewish practice of designating a guardian — a shomer — to watch over the body of a deceased person until burial, protecting them against desecration until they are safely interred. As poet-guardian, Sazzman guides readers through significant life events as well as daily routines; her poems offer glimpses into the realm of memory wherein loved ones are safeguarded. 

Split into three parts, The Shomer first watches over the speaker’s familial relationships, the poems securing the memories of those once in her care — mothers, fathers, children and grandchildren — and protecting them from the erosive nature of time and forgetting. In this initial section — which begins with “To Chaya (1915-2014),” an elegy for her deceased mother — the speaker travels from orphaned adulthood to childhood and back again, exploring the relationships parents have with their children, each other and themselves. The poet’s reflections are deepened and complicated by her own experiences of aging and parenting. In “October in the Neonatal ICU,” the speaker directs these words to her newborn grandson: 

Over stigmata pricked on your flesh, 

I bend, touch your forehead. 

The generations’ shared claim: 

to swaddle you beyond suffering,

line your transparent manger

with the straw of names. 

In these poems, loved ones’ bodies — eyes, hands and lungs — are preserved through memory along with hopes, failures and loves.  Threads of forgetting and destruction expand to questions of tradition and rite in the collection’s second section, “The Body Sanctuary,” where the poems attend to old practices and rituals of life in the face of time, loss and persecution — particularly as they relate to Judaism. From “Seek and Hide in Prague’s Old Jewish Cemetery” to “Jewish Girl’s Guide to Guacamole” and “Renewing Vows in the Atlantic,” the speakers in these poems search for asylum in the spaces once occupied by other bodies — loved bodies, lost bodies, and former versions of oneself. In “Peeling the Orange,” for example, the speaker breaks open the skin of an orange and reminisces about the way her father did the same each morning throughout her childhood, concluding, 

                The peeling 

releases nectar that clings to my fingers,

perfumes my palms for hours. Perhaps we can

tease out the pungencies, reconstitute

the fullness, un-seamed, returned to one another.

These spaces grow more tangible toward the collection’s end as Sazzman turns her eye to the physical, flesh-and-bone body as well as the material objects it handles and fills: a grandmother’s sealskin coat, for example, or another person’s thighs. This final selection of poems progresses steadily through themes of sensuality and pleasure as Sazzman recounts adolescent flirtations. In a reprieve from the collection’s generally heavier tone, readers get a fleeting taste of the author’s wry humor before moving to loss and unfamiliarity as she ruminates on the ways bodies begin to say their goodbyes. To watch over the body corporeal — our own and others’ — is to see damage and desire, fruit and rot, these poems suggest. But “Better to / welcome the wounding, no matter how deep the cut” than remain unscathed.

Sazzman explains her thematic choices in the collection’s introduction: “Under the best of circumstances the Shomer gains a glimpse into the liminal, into what happens in the space between love and loss, hunger and fulfillment, forgetting and remembering.” Though the collection’s final portrayals of memory are clouded by grief, nostalgia, age and human fallibility, The Shomer succeeds in its role as guardian, artfully preserving the poet’s love for those who welcomed her into this life and those whom she has welcomed in turn. Here, loved ones are held fast in memory, preserved through poetry, protected until we are all buried. And what a blessing to be so lovingly guarded by a poet as skilled as Ellen Sazzman.

Riffs & Improvisations by Gregory Luce; published in 2021 by Kelsay Books (33 pages, $19) 

Music is the master key to emotion, declares Gregory Luce’s collection Riffs & Improvisations. Here, when music plays, fervent sentiment spills forth, filling the poems with earnest and reverential contemplations of sensuality, yearning, wistfulness, loss and, above all, love. 

As these poems traverse emotions, so too do they span place and time, from a Metrorail station in “Music to It” — where the speaker perpetually searches for the right song to play in his life’s soundtrack — to awaiting divine judgment after death in “Richard Strauss in Purgatory.” Most of the poems portray a lone speaker isolated by time, death or his own thoughts, pondering music and the moods it conjures, each contributing a line in an ardent love letter to the art form.

In one of the collection’s more sorrowful pieces, “Satie in the Dark,” the speaker turns off the lights and plays Gymnopédie No. 1, intentionally invoking memories of “old lovers, my dead– / my father and mother / and the others.” It’s a solitary séance that reminds the speaker of his own inevitable death, only to be snapped out of his reverie by the start of a new song. Here and throughout the collection, as music opens the speaker to emotion, it also functions to facilitate eulogy and memory, linking past and present.

With a title such as Riffs & Improvisations, there comes an expectation that the poems within feature rhythms and meters, evoking the very compositions with which they are preoccupied, but most poems here are free verse without a noticeable musical pattern. Luce tends toward explicitness over subtlety when painting a scene and, rather than mimicking song, what many of his poems capture is the sensation of listening to music. In “Aspirins and Coffee,” Coltrane plays, and the speaker is consumed by the sound: 

Jimmy’s bass notes step up my spine and thump

      the base of my skull

Elvin’s sticks tattoo the back of my head from the inside

McCoy’s chords shatter like fine crystal behind my eyes

“a Love Supreme a Love Supreme”

and then Trane’s lines burn up from my gut like raw liquid sugar

      like hot syrup like pure honey

To experience Riffs & Improvisations to best effect, readers might want to play aloud the music referenced therein as they read each poem. When the notes of “A Love Supreme” accompany “Aspirins and Coffee,” readers can truly feel the impact of the beat, their own fingers tapping in tandem with the speaker’s as he sits at his kitchen table. 

Luce’s collection ends with a revisit to this song and these moving lines: “I try to work my pen / for Trane the way / he played his sax / for God.” This is Riffs & Improvisations at its finest: a poet composing in awe of others’ craft, enveloping himself and the audience in a love of music. 

My Poetry Is the Beauty You Overlook by Kim B. Miller; self-published in 2020 (73 pages, $16)

Kim B. Miller wants more from you. And more for you, too. Demanding readers’ attention from the beginning, her collection My Poetry Is the Beauty You Overlook opens with a poem that ends with the following lines:

My name is poetry and I will never be what you want to hear

But truth cannot be ignored

Poetry is not what I do

Words are what I breathe and I decided to come exhale on you

Part poetry collection and part motivational guide, My Poetry presents the work of the first African American to serve as the poet laureate of Prince William County, Virginia. Emboldened by experience and the personalization of her craft, Miller is determined to speak her truth and inspire others to do the same. 

My Poetry’s themes are wide-ranging, from the truth-telling role of poetry to the struggle against anti-Black racism. The collection incorporates an unconventional format: Each chapter explores a different theme through a sequence of one free-form poem, followed by a featured haiku, six more haiku, and finally a so-called “Kimism.” These Kimisms are candid sayings that clinch each chapter’s theme — for instance, “Some of you are too busy trying to explain your journey to someone who will not be going with you” comes at the end of a chapter urging confidence and self-love. 

Given Miller’s professional experience as a motivational speaker, it is unsurprising that many of her poems adopt this style. Nearly every poem in My Poetry adopts a second-person point of view, addressing the reader directly. The many haiku are key examples of Miller’s motivational tone, as in the featured haiku of the chapter “Mom, Gone Too Soon”: 

You cannot divide

Yourself into fractions to

Make someone else whole

This inescapable “you” present throughout the collection consistently demands more of the reader — more attention, more introspection, more accountability, and more love. 

Miller’s haiku also exemplify her taste for playing with tradition. While adhering to the established five-seven-five syllable structure of a classic haiku, Miller often makes inventive modifications to the words’ arrangement within lines. Three times in the first chapter, she makes the two syllables of “poet” stretch from one line to the next. In “Judging,” she writes, 

Just cause they don’t po-

et like you poet that doesn’t

mean they aren’t poets.

The splitting of po-et while sticking with traditional structure underscores Miller’s meaning: Poetry is malleable, and the liberties taken with art do not negate the writer’s artistry.

In this way, Miller has learned to claim more for herself, to declare her own love and praise — and she insists that her readers do the same. The opening free-verse poem in Chapter 8, “Poetry Is,” reads: 

Poetry is unsolicited help

It holds us up when pain tries to erase our voice

It allows us to pour into emptiness and create peace 

Like much unsolicited help, it can be tough to swallow. Bold, funny and earnest, My Poetry Is the Beauty You Overlook knows that there is beauty in truth and insists that you see it.

Morgan Musselman is a reader and writer living in Washington, DC. Morgan holds a bachelor’s degree in English Literature from the University of Iowa. Upon graduation, she moved to Washington, D.C. and began her current position working in the fundraising and communications department of a local nonprofit. In her free time, Morgan can be found at coffee shops around the city, desperately trying to clear up space on her to-read shelf, or at a bookstore undoing all her progress.

By Olivia Kozlevcar

This article was first published in Washington Independent Review of Books here.

It takes a cognizant, careful writer to create works that honor the lives of ordinary people thrown into political and cultural turmoil. Marilyn Oser, author of the new novel This Storied Land, is such an author. This Storied Land tells the tale of a small circle of people living in Palestine during the British Mandate, and how their lives are shaped by it.

This novel is historical fiction that moves through a number of years in the early 20th century. How much research went into writing it?

My novels ordinarily have their beginnings with a question or a problem that I want to answer. In the case of This Storied Land, I wanted to know what happened in Palestine during the British Mandate, 1920-48. How did the conflict affect ordinary people’s lives — a farmer, say, or a laundress, a partisan, a nurse, a student. I started in my usual way, by reading novels of or about the period to see how fiction had treated the subject and whether I had something to add. I did. The novels written in the 1950s — Exodus, The Haj — provided an introduction to the issues but proved way too one-sided, favoring the Jewish settlers, ignoring or belittling Arab culture. (I use the term Arab or Arabic rather than Palestinian for clarity since Jews, too, were considered Palestinians at the time.) I moved to novels by Israeli authors, including S.Y. Agnon, Amos Oz, and Meir Shalev. (If you’re looking for a good read, by the way, I recommend Shalev’s Two She-Bears).

I had a deep background in Zionism through the research I’d done for my blog, Streets of Israel, which provides information about the people behind the street names of Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem. Now, I began reading and taking notes from histories written by Israeli, British, and (current) Palestinian scholars. Not surprisingly, I became thoroughly confused amid a welter of conflicting claims by classical, revisionist, and post-revisionist scholars. What was the god’s honest truth? The same quandary has arisen in my research for two of my previous novels, Rivka’s War, set during World War I, and November to July, set at the Paris Peace Conference. Experience told me that, sooner or later, the wheat would separate from the chaff, and I would have facts that I could rely on by the weight of the evidence.

I continued to search out novels written during the period, as well as memoirs of that time, since those were the most likely to provide the little details that bring a story to life — what people were eating, or what cigarettes they were smoking, how they bought their food, what games the children played, what families did on outings at the beach. These were general impressions. Once I began writing, I used the internet to look up specific pieces of information that I needed. It was an online source when I was researching Rivka’s War that told me the color and texture of the soil in Ukraine, a detail I needed when Rivka dug a garden. In This Storied Land, to depict the Palestine Broadcasting System’s first moments on air, I used the internet to search out radios being produced in Europe circa 1936: what they looked like, how much they cost, which ones were available in Palestine.

My major research was finished by the time I started writing. By then, I had a good sense of the daily lives and concerns of Jews, Arabs, and Britons, and what they would confront. Over my two years of facing the page each day, I continued looking for specific bits of information; went on reading work by Jewish and Arabic poets and essayists; sought out photographs and watched [historical] videos to deepen my sense of the times; and listened to traditional Middle Eastern music, especially the oud, a stringed instrument of great emotional depth.

With This Storied Land, what responsibility did you feel in terms of depicting the history of Israel and Palestine accurately?

In the summer of 2019, I was hiking in the Caucasus Mountains when I fell into a conversation with a fellow hiker whose familiarity with the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) was far greater than my own. What she told me was food for thought that I kept chewing over long after the trip was done. Part of the impetus for writing this novel was my intention to do justice to the plight of the Arabs. I like to call my style of writing “history forward.” I feel a responsibility — no, an obligation — to my reader to get the facts right and portray the history faithfully in its effect on ordinary people. When the course of the narrative demands that I invent a fiction, I try for a workaround wherever I can, and usually I find one. I’m aware of only one factual change I made in This Storied Land: I moved up the destruction of an Arab village by one month to suit the demands of the narrative. Other than that — and a typo in Ben-Gurion’s date of death — I believe that the history I’ve depicted is accurate, and I think the story I tell is more compelling because of it.

You split the story up in sections, sort of like vignettes, some of which include definitions and clarifications. Why?

When I told an Israeli friend of mine that I was working on a novel set in Palestine, she hesitated — mused — [and] then said, “You can’t.” I laughed, wondering what she meant. But once I started doing my research in earnest, I discovered how extraordinary these times were. Things of consequence happened virtually every day, and Arabs, Jews, and Britons found themselves locked in an ever-shifting, toxic triangle. Meanwhile, world events weighed ever more heavily on them all — along with a trail of history going back into antiquity. Since I wasn’t up for a thousand-page tome with long expository passages, I needed a way to bring in a lot of information in an economical format. I was stumped.

Then, while reading Colum McCann’s Apeirogon, I realized I could adapt a technique he used to encompass the current Israeli-Palestinian morass. I began looking for allusive quotations to incorporate into the narrative — from newspapers, the Old Testament, the Qu’ran, Jewish and Arabic poetry, eyewitness accounts, and bits of knowledge from the science and the arts of the period. Employing this narrative structure enabled me to tell a multifaceted story in just 285 pages. It also provided thematic material. Schrödinger’s Cat was one of the scientific breakthroughs I included in This Storied Land; another was Einstein’s entangled particles. I was able to use Schrödinger’s conceptualization of being simultaneously dead and not dead as a metaphor in the novel, and to play with Einstein’s concept of entanglement in various ways involving people and things.

What’s next?

For the first time since starting Rivka’s War, I don’t know what will come next. I haven’t had much leisure in the last several years for recreational reading. I’m going to spend the next six months catching up on my long list of books to enjoy, while playing around with ideas for future writing of

Reviewed by Olivia Kozlevcar

This article was first published in Washington Independent Review of Books here.

It’s chilling enough being the sole woman trapped in the woods with a group of men and no phone reception. But in Catherine Ryan Howard’s Run Time, the men are also producing a low-budget horror film — one that only shoots in the dead of night.

Relying on psychological manipulation rather than gore, Run Time follows last-minute fill-in Adele Rafferty, a former soap star, as she returns home to Ireland from Los Angeles to play the movie’s lead, Kate. She carries a failing career in one hand and an NDA in the other. When she arrives on the set of “Final Draft,” Adele notices eerie details that start to become unsettling. But are they merely strange or something more sinister?

The novel is a quick read made possible by the quality of its plot development. Adele is a solid everywoman, capturing readers’ attention by inviting us into her head and embracing her own shortcomings. Her travails offer an unpolished look at the complexities of being a young woman in a sometimes-vicious industry and trying to withstand the emotional and physical toll — and fear — that comes along with it.  

Howard breaks up the text by inserting sections of the “Final Draft” script between chapters. It’s a bold, innovative move that helps build suspense from one plot point to the next. Even better, the parallels between the script and the main narrative allow readers to take a stab at guessing what’s coming next in the story:

KATE

(whispering)

You’re okay. You’re okay.

(voice breaking)

You’ll be okay.

And then –

A pinprick of white light appears in the distance.

Kate stops. She blinks, squints.

We see the light from her POV, her vision blurred by tears and rain, and watch as the light comes into focus, splits into two, each orb growing brighter, bigger –

Kate, lit now by the approaching white light, raises a hand to shield her eyes from it.

And now we hear something too: an ENGINE. A car is coming up the road. Kate runs toward it, into the middle of the road, waving her arms. 

Dramatic interludes aside, Run Time is flawed. Coming on the heels of the author’s critically acclaimed 56 Days, it has large shoes to fill. While both novels are set during the pandemic, covid-19 is integral to 56 Days but is merely a plot device here. Howard’s frequent heavy-handed one-liners on the subject detract from Run Time because the pandemic is unrelated to the story at hand.

To her credit, the author evidently conducted a great deal of research on the entertainment industry prior to writing this book (she cites her brother, an actor, as part of her inspiration). Unfortunately, her allusions to things like #MeToo vis-à-vis the film business often feel clumsy and draw the reader away from the action. She might’ve done better by focusing more on Adele’s particular underlying fears and allowing them to speak broadly for the trials endured by women in the trade.

Moreover, while the ending isn’t obvious, the story’s main twist is predicted early on by Adele. It left me wondering why the author would choose to reveal the novel’s most interesting development before it’s had time to grow. In addition to this self-inflicted wound, some of the book’s other turns are predictable, as when the only “nice guy” on the set turns out to have his own malicious motives (à la “Promising Young Woman,” a film whose writer/director, Emerald Fennell, is alluded to early on).

Overall, Howard’s novel is an entertaining read. The twists and turns of Adele’s sordid tale are interesting, and the narrative is well written. If you’re just dipping your toe into horror, Run Time is a good place to start. Avid fans of the genre, however, may feel let down. So, proceed with caution.

By Olivia Kozlevcar

This article was first published August 9, 2022 in Washington Independent Review of Books here.

Given our current political climate, it’s hard to imagine writing DC-themed fiction that’s stranger than truth, but Joe Rothstein has done just that in his new novel, The Moment of Menace: The Future Looks Glorious…Unless We All Die First. Rothstein, whose long career spans both politics and literature, braids the two worlds together in a riveting story that gives readers a glimpse of what our democracy could become — for better or worse.  

Your deep knowledge of politics comes through in this book. Is it challenging writing fictional stories about a very real system?

Think about what it means to be a candidate. Depending on the political office at stake, you will need to raise considerable campaign money, much of it by personally asking friends, family, co-workers, strangers. In a real sense, you will have to learn to beg. You will have to hire a professional staff and recruit dozens, hundreds, possibly thousands of volunteers, a hugely difficult exercise in high-pressure management. You will need to appear in public every day, sometimes in the media, weighing every word lest it be misinterpreted, often purposely, by the opposition.

Tension will increase as Election Day approaches, whether the polls have you ahead or behind. The money won’t be enough. The attacks on your character will increase, all in public media. Your family will feel under siege. You will get conflicting advice. Every day, you will need to make decisions, any one of which could cause you to win or lose the election. This is stuff of high drama, and I lived it through more than 200 campaigns. Marriages were…destroyed, so were reputations, wealth, hopes, and dreams. I don’t need to use my imagination to develop characters and situations. I just need to remember.

Your novel follows a charismatic American president named Isabel Aragon Tennyson. How did you shape this character? 

During my campaign career, I met many strong, capable, and courageous women: candidates, spouses, campaign leaders, and others. We’ve never elected a woman president. I decided that I would, and that she would be a composite of many women I met who would have made great real-life presidents.

This book is as much a dystopian novel as a thriller. Do you find it difficult to approach the dystopia genre without being overly pessimistic?

I’m a democrat with both a small and capital D. But democracy is struggling to effectively meet the challenges of the 21st century. And because democracy is underperforming, anti-democratic forces are presenting a serious challenge. It’s essential to recognize and meet this challenge. So, I write not as a purveyor of doom but rather with a call to action. Rather than write essays about this, I’ve chosen to write entertaining thrillers and wrap them around real public problems.

What does waiting to write until you’ve gained some life experience bring to the resulting work?

Perspective. The curved edges of “good” and “evil” and “right” and “wrong.” Living through chapters of life to see many of them resolve, gaining insight from experience.

What’s next for you?

One of my summer-vacation jobs in college was with an automobile stunt show, sort of a car circus of smashed cars, daredevil motorcyclists, and a finale with a car and driver being shot out of a cannon. We traveled the country as the Motor Olympics. I was “Suicide Saunders.” That’s my next book.

By Thais Carrion

This article was first published in DC Trending here. 

Creatures of Passage pays tribute to an unseen southeast DC, a magical, dark, humid space where the dead walk amongst the living and intuition rules the land. Blending Egyptian mythology and the strong black history of Anacostia, author Morowa Yejidè, gives us a world where there are no states or counties, instead, kingdoms and fiefdoms spread out along the East Coast.  A cast of characters find themselves inevitably drawn to the mystical realm of Anacostia, a place where “Dreams come true even when you don’t want them to.”  In an endlessly dark story, the tragedies faced by each character interconnect and join in a heart-racing climax, where many must finally confront their ghosts in order to move forward with their lives.

We first learn about Nephthys Kinwell — a mysterious driver with a half-finger and a supernatural sense for lost souls — when she is summoned by the wandering hearts of Anacostia’s residents. She never fails to show up in her haunted 1967, blue Plymouth Belvedere, which never breaks down, runs out of gas or gets pulled over despite her inebriated state of driving. She is a somber character, always on the move, so as not to feel the pain after losing her twin brother, Osiris. 

Nephthys, her nephew Dash, and his mother Amber Kinwell (the death witch of Anacostia) are simultaneously reviled and rendered indispensable residents of Anacostia. For all the fear and mysticism generated around the family, the Kinwells guide the wandering hearts of Anacostia through their painful journeys and individual tragedies.

Helplessness is center to the story and Yejide masterfully cultivates dramatic irony across every new scene and character. Jumping through timelines, the narrator never fails to include the developments of the future that render our character’s present conflicts and worries futile. Much like the nature of death and rebirth, futility and the promise of change play big roles in the undercurrents of the story as characters are swept up in their respective paths and ultimately forgotten by the future and the gentrification of Anacostia’s black history.

Yejide’s intensive use of dramatic irony is a nod to our own privileged lives.  Writing about places of privilege within the structures that govern so much of our daily lives is a topic Yejide navigates subtly, but clearly drawing a line between the reader and the realities of her characters.

The magical kingdom descriptions of the east coast and its neighboring states work to further separate the Anacostia of the ‘70s and our own understandings of the United States and its history.  Anacostia’s black heritage feels like an otherworldly, anachronistic place, one fully separate from the development and gentrification that has taken over the area today.

Yejidè is careful in telling her story with its histories and complex inner worlds. Much like a ride through the river Styx, Creatures of Passage starts off with a clear purpose, loses its way in the tragedy of the lost souls along the path, but finds purpose anew as tragedies are weaved in and move closer towards closure and release.

Yejidè’s odyssey confronting relevant current societal issues has set her apart as one of 16 nominees for the Women’s Prize for Fiction long list. Championing the voices of women writers on the global stage, the Women’s Prize for Fiction goes beyond a simple award by working with libraries, and writers, organizing reading groups, and events, and prioritizing free resources to honor the work of historically marginalized writers.