[a conversation with short story writer and playwright, Abuchi Modilim]
LH: I’ve been thinking about reverence and how to define it for myself. What makes you reverent of some writers (beyond just admiring their work?)
AM: I think reverence should be a personal thing. I revere writers who support emerging writers. I revere writers with great personalities too but the former is what I find most interesting.
LH: The writers I revere most, I feel like are excavating me from something very dull that keeps me from really seeing. Sometimes that dullness is just getting wrapped up in the day – a lot ushers past me unobserved. If I give myself ten minutes to read a hero, I notice how much I’m ignoring!
[Esiaba Irobi]
AM: "How much I'm ignoring." It is the phrase. No writer is completely free of this. When I’m not writing, I go back to E. C. Osondu and Wole Soyinka. I like how E.C. Osondu writes. Effortlessly. His writing screams freedom. I read Chigozie Obioma, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Okey Ndibe, Chika Unigwe, Esiaba Irobi, I can't exhaust the names. But undoubtedly, I have read E. C. Osondu more. Wole Soyinka's play 'The Lion And The Jewel' taught me the craft of playwriting. His characters are real. The originality of his poetic dialogue is incomparable. Who are the writers you go back to?
[Lauren, with her copy]
LH: Right now we’re back with Pizarnik, Tranströmer, and Zbigniew Herbert. Do you think you write for the kind of reader you are?
[Pizarnik's books are treasures]
AM: I write what I would love to read. And I don't have specific readers in mind when I am writing. Writing a good story or play is my foremost obligation when I sit to write. I focus on the form, and not intention. You write for your kind of readers?
LH: I think I’m writing with the idea of telling a secret, whoever is receiving that is beyond me. What do you find mysterious or unknowable about your own work? Does that change per genre you’re working in?
AM: This question reminded me about the writing workshop facilitated by J.K Anowe at the University of Nigeria. He had asked us to study our writing to find out the spectacular thing about it that we don't know. It was that day that I discovered that I often have a weird character in my writing. I was surprised. I was never aware until after that workshop. And this does not change per genre. You would see this character in my short stories and plays.
LH: Do you tend to consider your audience as your contemporaries, or do you think about the future?
AM: First, I consider my contemporaries. I also think about how my work would carry on into the future but I don't let it bother me. Great works would live after the writer is gone. It is not the writer who decides that. The works of William Shakespeare who died in 1616 are still being taught in universities around the world. I use him for this example because of the era in which he wrote. I am sure he was not writing for us then but we are reading him today.
[The Tragedy of Macbeth, 2021]
LH: How did your genres come to you?
AM: The genres I now write short stories and plays came naturally to me. I didn't force them. I wrote poems in my early days of writing. I stopped writing poems to focus on short stories and plays. I don't chew my fingers when I sit and face the screen of my laptop to write a short story or play. And I am currently working on a full-length play that will be published in 2023. Although now, I write poems once in a while and luckily for me good journals accept them. I had entered for Jack Grapes Poetry Prize in 2021 and made the semi-finalist list.
I think the literary writer is first a poet. It doesn't matter if they are writing poetry or not. Whichever language the writer chooses to write with, reflects poetry. Have you written other genres before?
LH: I started as a fiction writer and took a long time to admit I was a poet. I was most afraid and most affected by poetry. There’s no turning around now though, I want to stay here.
Abuchi Modilim is an Igbo-born storyteller and playwright. He is the winner of the 2021 Arojah Students Playwriting Prize. And the curator of Enyo: An Anthology of Contemporary African Plays. His writing has appeared in No Tokens Journal, Jellyfish Review, Kalahari Review, Abandon Journal, Samjoko Magazine, and is forthcoming in Native Skin, the State University of New York Praxis: Journal of Gender and Cultural Critiques, and elsewhere. He has been nominated for Best Small Fictions. Currently, he is studying English and literary studies with a minor in Theatre and film studies, at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.
Terrific post! Thank you so much for brightening my day wioth your choice of reverence, something so lacking in our undignified lives. The other thing I love is the photo of "Macbeth," which is amazing.
Posted by: sarah gelder | May 10, 2022 at 07:34 PM