12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jumoke Verissimo

Jumoke Verissimo is a poet and novelist living in Toronto. She is the author of two well-recognised collections: i am memory and The Birth of Illusion , both published in Nigeria and nominated for various awards, including the Nigeria Prize for Literature. Her most recent novel A Small Silence , received critical acclaim and was nominated for several awards, including the Edinburgh Festical First Book Award and the RSL Ondaatje Prize. It won the Aidoo-Synder Book Prize. Her writing explores traumatic re/constructions of everyday life and its intersection with gender, focusing on themes of love, loss and hope. She currently teaches in the Department of English Toronto Metropolitan University.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I think I can compare my first book to seeing a child take her first step. I wrote my first book in my teens, at 18 or 19, and it was published when I was in my early twenties. It was well-received, and it definitely paved the way for me. You know how the first step gives a child confidence that she can do more, I guess that was what it meant for me. Over the years, my writing has evolved so much, as my thinking and exposure and it shows in my subsequent works. Still, I will always cherish my "baby steps," for emboldening me to think, I have subdued the fear of not being heard. The excitement remains when I publish a new book, but this time it is not about taking a first step, it is about the possibilities of where I can reach with these steps, and how much it is also about preservation, that is beyond me. I have come to see how writing also becomes a form of survival, not in an existential way, but in a way that explores a de/reflection, which I am thinking of as how we are not just shattering the image of my previous reflections, a distortion that may or may not bring clarity, and even instances of contemplation that feel impulsive, all while quieting the many forms of anxieties that are mine and those that belong to others. 

I guess the thing about my most recent work, Circumtrauma , is that it ascertains the possibilities of the more that I can do. You know, each new book gives its own clarity, and it is different. I feel like I grow an inch when I publish a new book, and that is what I feel like now. I can see how, in my recent writing, there is the breaking down and moving beyond a past self-image or identity I have had about myself. I think I remain consistent and intentional, such that my poetry becomes what Joe Brainard would describe as “that certain something we so often find missing.” When I say about myself, it is also about how I now see the world and it is not necessarily me in the poems, but me learning to make room for others in my poem, in a way that I can read the evolution of self in it.  Also, I guess I am now coming to the realization that in my writing generally, completion is not always an endpoint but a moment of cessation. I also know, more than ever, that the writing I do now is necessary, even when it feels disorienting. There is the memory of the fragmented self that wants to read a clear and coherent image from inside and outside of themselves. 

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I'd say music. I know music isn’t poetry, but there's a connection, and that's what first introduced me to it. Looking back, music filled my childhood home. I come from a rich culture of oral poetry, and this influenced how I first experienced it. It also showed me that poetry could be in anything and everywhere. The idea of poetry as a written form in the English language, however, came from a set of old books. I don't know if it was the same in Canada, but in Nigeria, it was fashionable among the Silent Generation and Baby Boomers to have a shelf of encyclopedias in their living rooms. My dad, who is from the Silent Generation, had a four-volume set of The World of Children’s Encyclopedia. I read those four green hardbacks until they were worn out. They contained excerpts of poetry from classic Western literature. I would copy the poems and then write my own. I also remember my brothers being assigned poetry anthologies like Poems of Black Africa, edited by Wole Soyinka, among others I can't recall now. It all feels so distant, and too many things have dragged along those memories. 

But, meeting Odia Ofeimun, a Nigerian poet who had a huge collection of books and old newspapers at the Association of Nigerian Authors was a different experience. He had so many books in his house, and you couldn’t walk past a wall that didn’t have a shelf leaning against it. It was a dream come true, nothing like I had seen. He was also eager to discuss the books, so I was constantly reading, though it all feels like a blur now. He’d suggest one book and then another and then another. I was also meeting other poets, and I guess that's a short version of how poetry came to me. These are the things I can remember, but how I came to poetry is simply me realizing that I found it to be a dependable place to hold myself together.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I took a while with this question because I am thinking about how each writing project is different and how it situates my own transformation as a person. You start off thinking you’d end up this way and then you end up another way. I see my writing the same way. I mean, I can only make plans, but the writing itself can re-invent itself along the way and it happens all the time. I am lucky sometimes, even with airtight planning, these things give way. So, I’d say, it all depends on what I am working on.

Circumtrauma, my latest poetry collection, that Coach House is publishing, emerged from my PhD work, and that it is the creative aspect of years of research and thinking on how best to resolve how several negative emotions that become grievances following a war are transmitted across generations. The theoretical thinking of making sense of resentment and hatred became an interest in identifying the many emotions that become transferable across generations. I then began to think of how this translates into the way war victims narrate a war, especially one deepened by colonial legacies and conflated by years of political misrule. What is remembered? Whose voice is the heard and whose, gets repressed? How deep does the felt emotions of the crisis embody generations unborn—especially when what is passed on as negative emotions like “hate” and the “pain”? What is remembered, the pain or the event?

In this case, the poetry shifted from impulsion to the deliberateness in letting time present its own perspective and offer me a chance to re-see and deepen my questions. It was about experimenting with narratives that are beyond mine and trying to invent traces of the leftover emotions in them.

My point is, each writing project dictates its own urgency, and this does not always translate to time. It could be how much time is needed to work around form and structure or simply fumbling with word choice or even an urgency that is primarily just about the anxieties of conceiving what is felt—you know that idea of knowing there is a poem in the vibrating silence that is concealed but asking to be let out.

In all of this, what emerges are first drafts that look nothing like their final shape. The initial writing is the fragmented memories that slip into the mind in a quiet time, the rough scribbles on notes here and there collected from conversations, eavesdropping, chat groups, or wherever, the unwritten short story that imagination brought in a dream. The first draft feels like a breakthrough until I read it the following day. I can tell you for free, anything I send out without reading over and over again turns out to be a disaster. I have realized that I am a logorrheic thinker, and I will always need to clarify my thoughts and make a microcosmic universe from the vastness of my thoughts, so I think it over and over and over again and write. Maybe we can say the writing project starts when I begin to focus my thinking on a particular project. And how long this thinking happens is not something I can control in a sense of "this should end now." I know most writers would say starting any particular project begins with thinking, and that takes time. Some ideas clarify themselves as you begin to think through, and the layers of complexities, or the absence of them, become what I anticipate in the writing. I do like to think, and that’s my favorite thing in the world: to just be and think of whatever I am fascinated with, to contemplate over a sentence or a word over and over, to feel excited about an image and ponder its many sides. Thinking is writing for me, and my belief is that if I invest adequate time in the thinking, I may—may—just be able to have an idea of where I need to go with the writing. So, I really do not know how to quantify the duration of the thinking process, but I have come to know that the ability to give time to an idea in my thinking may result in what feels like a speeding up of the writing, as I have done most of the structure and imagining in my head, and then I start the writing. Most of the time, what I imagine is different from what comes out—and that is totally fine. The point is to have something to work with, and I try to beat it into shape, not with the intention to have what I pictured in my head, but to have what best conveys the emotions surrounding what I was trying to say.Thinking for me takes time and it is the most important part of my writing, and if I can think carefully and begin to visualize it to a point where I can feel it in my fingers and my synapses begin sending signals that drag me to my desk, I obsess over the project until it is done.

4 - Where does a poem or work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I like to think of Poetry as being in everything, actually, I mean, it's about learning to listen and to pay attention to how we exist and interact with the world. It is the art of refining a scattered focus into a lingering image, a word, a film, a book, or a piece of writing, and then interrogating it because it aligns with or goes contrary to your own view. Poetry is a profound act of translation. It's the moment when the chaos of experience is distilled into the precise order of language. It is not merely a record of observation but a transformation, where the poet's inner life, and we talking about their emotions, intellect, and memory, collides with the world beyond the person. It is the lens’s fleeting frame, the memory that lives in a single word, the music of a phrase that becomes a memorial of gestures, and the material that births a new form, it is the dance on the page when the music stops. Poetry is the brave, it is the vulnerable, it is the work of feeling and thought. It is the language of suggestion and compression, that leaps beyond the sentence of a story. It is a dialogue with the self and an invitation to the reader, to think together and see one thing, but in many ways.

So, a poem begins when I can capture the poetry in that moment. A project could start when there’s an encounter with what feels like an idea asking to be upturned, observed, and disrupted. The problem, however, is that some ideas feel ready, but the moment I go into thinking mode, they go nowhere. I may not be the one to recognise the poetry in that moment. I feel that when I do, the instances when I can make poetry of an event or a moment, I feel deep gratitude. 

I have written standalone poems and one or two short stories, but I love to work on larger projects from the beginning. I like the wholesome experience of not knowing where it will lead me. There's something very final—and feverishly so—about short pieces that can be satisfying but also abysmal in their abruptness. Perhaps it is also because I am a pathetic ruminator, and reflecting on the turns and shifts of a book is more satisfying. Still, I do write short forms; I only wish I could give them more time.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
First, I should say that I am grateful to have opportunities to do readings. When I think about it, I consider it as a form of privilege, and I have high regards for those who create these spaces. And then again, to answer your question, public readings are both a part of and counter to my creative process. We can begin by considering, readings as part of the creative process. In the instance where they provide an opportunity to reflect and think differently about a work I have written. I remember a question someone in the audience asked me at a festival in Edinburgh in 2019 that I found myself connecting to a news story, which would later inspire me to begin work on the novel I am currently working on. This is a crucial function of readings; they allow for a dialogue with an audience that can spark new ideas. The other one is how Readings act as a counter to my creative process, when one considers that aside being an opportunity to meet readers and fellow writers, I find it can also be overstimulating. I return home with ideas that I may not be able to explore, and there’s a feeling it generates in me. I don’t have a single word for it, but you may call it creative effervescence. It could be a positive for some writers, but there are instances where it is for me, an overflow of a bubbling over of new ideas and thoughts that, while exciting, can also be overwhelming and difficult to channel. I also have found times, when I yearn, so desperately for the company of other writers and readers, to hear them and to be heard. At the end of the day, we want to be read, we want to be heard. Isn’t that why we write?

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I am generally curious about the everyday. My past writing explores traumatic re/constructions of everyday life and its intersection with gender, focusing on themes of love, loss, and hope. I am trying to answer how we carry our most profound experiences of brokenness and resilience into the small, unremarkable moments of our lives. The current questions that preoccupy me revolve around how silence is used as both a weapon and a form of protection, and what new languages we must invent to articulate the unspoken. I also contemplate how trauma doesn't just shatter but also subtly reshapes our most mundane rituals, from eating breakfast to a casual conversation. And then there is also the question about the enduring architecture of hope in the face of profound damage, such as how people rebuild their sense of self and their relationships in a world that has been fundamentally altered. These are actually ongoing questions, and they manifest in different forms based on the theme or subject I engage in my writing.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
We are in a world that is evolving faster than ever, and what we would have considered as being ordinary is constantly defamiliarized. For this, in our present time, I would say the writer's role isn't what it "should" be, but what it has always been: to witness, to interpret, and to create meaning where there is none. The medium may change, but the purpose remains the same. Some may say that there is a current sense of collective ennui in our world which gives the impression that we are losing our way and do not know where we are headed. Again, this is where we need writers, we need writers to take on the role of cultural cartographers, piecing together spatial information and fragmented narratives that orient people, help them understand themselves in relation to others, and maybe even find a sense of moral or intellectual direction. Sometimes, it is simply to locate themselves in space and time. You know, like the Compass Rose. I really think the map is a good metaphor so I will explore it a little more, you know, because I think a writer embodies all of the map’s elements. We can say the writer performs the role of the Legend on the map; she provides legibility for the reader. She is the Compass Rose, as I mentioned earlier. The writer is a Scale, weighing the context and proportion of a narrative, like what I have attempted to do in my new poetry collection, Circumtrauma. You know, sometimes, you zoom in on single, personal stories swallowed by bigger ones, while also showing how they fit into the larger sweep of history or culture, providing both intimate detail and a grand perspective. There is also the Topography, which the writer brings attention to. Like many writers, drawing attention to the Sudanese, Somali, Congolese, Gaza-Israeli, Russo-Ukrainian crisis amongst others, they draw attention to the emotional and psychological terrain of human experience, the despair, and the challenging slopes of these conflicts. Writers situate these experiences for us to understand our relations to them. It is writers who make it possible for people to feel so closely, because they situate the burdens of these worlds into ours. A writer as a cartographer does not stop mapping; the writer continues to question the existence of borders and interrogate the lack of them as well.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I would like to think that working with an outside editor is both difficult and essential. I understand that for many, being a writer asserts a definitive expertise. It's the contrary for me; writing and being a writer is about an unending curiosity, and as we know, curiosity killed the cat. I think an editor can ensure I don’t end up "dead." I tell myself I am fallible, even while I do try, and of course I use glasses—that’s enough excuse to say I don’t see all of my errors.  Hahahaha

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Rest is work. 

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction to criticism to children's literature)? What do you see as the appeal?
I wouldn’t say it is easy, but I have learned to listen to how my ideas arrive and what they require me to do when they do Sometimes an idea presents itself, and you almost envision it in a particular genre. No matter how much I try to resist it, it's absolutely impossible to do so. Other times, I start with a particular genre with the same expectation, and it ends up as an epic failure. But I have come to learn to just leave it to time and to think and read several books in a particular genre until I feel something stirring in me. At the end, dabbling into genre has its own appeal, and for me, it is this feeling of novelty each time I am working on a writing project, and the expansive possibilities of also knowing that I can bring these different genres to encounter each other, if the inspiration to do so happens. Mostly, I think it is a state of creative serendipity, which I have learned to trust and not force.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I don’t know if what I have is a routine. So, my typical day, if it's a school day, would mean waking up around 6 a.m. to pray and then reflect or think for a few minutes about what my day would look like. If I anticipate a busy day and I'm working on something in particular, I take time to think through where I am and what I'd like to do next. After looking through my planner, I schedule my writing for a particular time of the day along with other activities. The rest of the morning is spent getting my daughter ready for school while I prepare to go to campus. Between teaching, going to meetings, or whatever life throws at me, I ensure I create a block of time to write. There are days, as much as I try, it isn’t possible. I have developed a method to write in chunks, and so far, it works for me. It's a longer process, but it's effective in a way that I can constantly feel myself thinking about the work I am doing, in a pace that is not consuming. Perhaps, the key to my writing is creating time in the morning for the unstructured part, which is thinking and devising a plan, and this is not necessarily one in stone. I just like the sense of ‘identifying’ how it looks in my head and “chewing the curd” of these ideas. Honestly, thinking is the hardest part of my writing, and it's increasingly difficult to do during the day. There are too many distractions, and I personally berate my own ideas. On those days when I find it hard to think in the mornings, I feel very unsettled the rest of the day. It’s that opportunity to regurgitate an old or new idea or image that clarifies me for whatever chunk of writing needs to be done for that day. It also allows me to anticipate how long a project may take and prepares me to write. But then again, this depends on the activities of the day and what writing I am focusing on for that period. 

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I wouldn't say my writing gets stalled, but I do get overwhelmed with my ideas. When that happens, I usually take time off from writing. I'll read, go out to meet people, or engage with other art forms like film. I also return to drawing, which I'm not good at now, but I continue to do because it refreshes me. I do like to wander into new spaces as well, go to somewhere new, a new street and walk down or something. Sit in nature, if the day allows it. 

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Hmmmm. I like this question. But the issue is that home is more than one place for me now, and the fragrance is dispersed across the borders. If you know the fragrance of the skies, perhaps that would be the one. I stare a lot at the skies these days, it could mean nothing, but it also says something. What would it mean to smell the skies?

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Oh, yes. Music plays a significant influence in my writing, perhaps because of how it can open up a numenistic presence, even when upbeat. I like the elevating power of music. I think that when we write, it is like entering into a new space where you can bring forth new things to exist that didn’t before now. I think all the other things you mentioned as well, even if it is not a direct influence that become the subject of my writing. For instance, the rhythm of seasons and the changes that happen inspire my approach to micro-details and the ordinariness of the familiar. I love photography, and largely for composition and structure. I turn towards photography to capture mood, and as for science, I am just curious about the new possibilities and that can also ignite my imagination.  

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
My connection to a piece of writing is less about the writer and more about the trace it leaves behind. I say this with a whole sense of humility. I value works that resonate with me in the moment and continue to influence how I think, act, or create in the future, and too many writers are a part of this fountain that I have quenched my thirst from. Honestly, I am finding that there’s something about listing writers that erases the universe of writers that I have embodied over the years. You know, those mosaic of voices that have shaped me. I don’t want to beat myself, as I usually have done in the past, to say why I forgot to mention this or that. Pardon me, too many writers have been my guiding light and who in all of these stars do I pick as the one that showed me the way?

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I am boring in that sense. Actually, I don't have any grand, unfulfilled ambition. My aspirations live in the day-to-day, in the constant wellspring of new ideas that my imagination provides. For me, living one day at a time, fully engaged, is the most meaningful pursuit.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Whatever it is, it’d have to be somewhere that deals with serving people and showing a lot of empathy. 

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
For so long, everything I imagined myself as, resolved itself on the pages. I guess I was stuck. I tried to do other things, but it was evident I would be useless if I didn’t end up as a writer. 

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Hmmmm. Great? —it does feel like a weight on my shoulder. Honestly, this question scares me. I don’t always know how to respond to the last great or best of anything. Because it is quite subjective. So, how about the book on my desk at this time, largely because they have to do with ongoing work or a refresher for particular techniques. I do have Iryn Tushabe’s Everything is Fine Here, Lisa Martin’s A story can be told about Pain, Antonio Olinto’s The Water House, Gregory Pardlo’s Spectral Evidence, Otoniya J. Okot Bitek’s We, The Kindling and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. I also have Chimwemwe Undi’s Scientific Marvel, Ian William’s Word Problems. Tolu Oloruntoba’s Unravel, Danez Smith’s Bluff, and a few others. As for films, I have been focusing on documentary this summer. But I watched I saw the TV glow on Kanopy, and I found it quite interesting, perhaps unusual and not what I’d watch typically, but I liked how it explores gender dysphoria, and its surrealist approach and great pictures. I also saw Sinners and I liked it too. 

20 - What are you currently working on?
I’m so damn superstitious so maybe I'd just say I'm busy, but this is a current on-going project www.ancestralmist.com, and I’d invite folks to check out.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;