Title: The First Book: Addie E. Citchens
Author: Addie E. Citchens
The Book: Dominion(Macmillan, 2025)
The Elevator Pitch: In 25 words or less, what is your book about? Dominion is a story of how the church makes heroes and monsters out of men and how sometimes the two are indistinguishable.
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The Rumpus: Where did the idea of your book come from?
Addie E. Citchens: I was born and raised a church kid in the Mississippi Delta. This novel came from my first observations of that culture, most prominently the inequities between men and women and the questionable ideas I was taught. I’ve always known I’d explore that in fiction, and Dominion is that offering.
Rumpus: How long did it take to write the book?
Citchens: This book took around 6 months of actual writing time and about 13 years of living and maturing.
Rumpus: Is this the first book you’ve written? If not, what made it the first to be published?
Citchens: Dominion isn’t the first book I’ve written. Since leaving grad school, I’ve probably written 10 novels that I keep shelving and reworking when I get stuck on something. Though, Dominion was technically the first novel I’d ever thought about writing since my early days in the church. It was the first to be published because a sample of it won FSG’s inaugural Writer’s Fellow program, which included a very nice cash prize and editorial insight. My editor didn’t try to shape my work in any way or who I was as a writer, but what she did, is offer the much-needed encouragement and ask the most probing questions—it was like therapy for me and my work. As part of my contract, I agreed to let FSG have a first look at the completed novel.
Rumpus: In submitting the book, how many nos did you get before your yes?
Citchens: This version of the book got zero nos. FSG liked that first look of the completed novel, and I joined the family for real.
Rumpus: Which authors / writers buoyed you along the way? How?
Citchens: So many! Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston are my literary idols. Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying was an inspiration for how Dominion moves, as well as the absurdity of it all. Alice Walker, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Dorothy Allison, Warsan Shire, Gary Paulsen, Baldwin, Milele Lott, Julia Mallory, Kiese Laymon (the new godfather), Tananarive Due, Jamaica Kincaid, Kilah Dorsey, Dean Koontz—all of these writers and more—either I studied their work or my reading of their work freed me to expand my writing in some way.
Rumpus: How did your book change over the course of working on it?
Citchens: The first half of the book has changed very little since first drafting it back in the day, but after my fellowship and the life it took to write it properly, the second half changed dramatically.
Rumpus: Before your first book, where has your work been published?
Citchens: Before my book, I had been published in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Oxford American, Midnight & Indigo, Callaloo, and Mississippi Folklife Magazine.
Rumpus: What is the best advice someone gave you about publishing?
Citchens: Go big as you can, or stay on the porch.
Rumpus: Who’s the reader you’re writing to—or tell us about your target audience and how you cultivated or found it?
Citchens: I’m writing to anybody who likes a good story. Of course, everyone will receive and navigate the work differently and of course, not all cultural commentary is welcome or qualified, but I’d like to think anyone can read my stories and get something out of them, be it a laugh, a cry, a “what-the-fuck,” a “what-am-I-reading,” a “damn!”—a something!
Rumpus: What is one completely unexpected thing that surprised you about the process of getting your book published?
Citchens: All the behind-the-scenes work is what surprised me. For as long as I have been treating writing like a vocation and not just a hobby or pipe dream, I had unfortunately never been well-versed in the actual business of writing and publishing. There are a lot of steps between a contract and a shelve-able book, and for me, transitions mean anxiety. It was a year full of intestinal gas and those sugar plum dreams of impending doom for me, but I made it, lol!
