The Author: Uche Okonkwo
The Book: A Kind of Madness (Tin House, 2024)
The Elevator Pitch: Ten stories about dysfunctional families, fraught relationships, and things that drive us to madness.
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The Rumpus: Where did the idea of your book come from?
Uche Okonkwo: The ideas for the stories came from various life experiences: family, boarding school, living in Nigeria.
Rumpus: How long did it take to write the book?
Okonkwo: All the stories were written in a period of about ten years.
Rumpus: Is this the first book you’ve written? If not, what made it the first to be published?
Okonkwo: This is my first book.
Rumpus: In submitting the book, how many no’s did you get before your yes?
Okonkwo: I don’t remember. I didn’t really keep track of the numbers, and it stopped mattering to me when I got a yes from Tin House.
Rumpus: Which authors/writers buoyed you along the way? How?
Okonkwo: Reading short stories was particularly inspiring and reminded me of what’s possible with the form. I particularly admire Lesley Nneka Arimah’s short stories.
Rumpus: How did your book change over the course of working on it?
Okonkwo: This is a difficult question to answer because the stories were written over such a long period of time and were not necessarily written with a collection in mind, at least not early on. Some stories, particularly the older ones, changed a lot more than others. Some changes were structural or organizational (for example, including sections where there weren’t before). Others involved making the motivation of certain characters more legible.
Rumpus: Before your first book, where has your work been published?
Okonkwo: A lot of the stories in this collection were previously published in A Public Space, One Story, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019, and Lagos Noir.
Rumpus: What is the best advice someone gave you about publishing?
Okonkwo: I don’t remember from whom or where I first heard this, but the advice to “try not to write according to trends” is something I hold on to. I think going out of one’s way to write what’s currently trendy, just because it’s trendy, can be counterproductive and take the pleasure out of writing.
Rumpus: Who’s the reader you’re writing to—or tell us about your target audience and how you cultivated or found it?
Okonkwo: For this book, I hope that anyone who loves and appreciates short stories or is just curious about them will find something meaningful that they connect with and will hopefully read more short stories.
Rumpus: What is one completely unexpected thing that surprised you about the process of getting your book published?
Okonkwo: I was surprised at how short the timeline was from acceptance to release date. I had expected it to take longer than it did.
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Author photograph by Chris Cox
