(Note: These transcripts have been lightly edited for clarity and length.)
Jeané D. Ridges speaks with two authors published in khōréō’s very first issue, Jennifer Hudak (“The Taste of Centuries, the Taste of Home”) and Shingai Njeri Kagunda (“A Little History of Things Lost & Found”), about the relationship between diaspora and speculative fiction, their stories from conception to publication, and what they’ve been up to since, as well as how they stay centered amid systematic violence and everyday overwhelm.
Jennifer Hudak is a 2024 Nebula finalist for her story “The Witch Trap” in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and her work can also be found in venues such as Strange Horizons, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and The Sunday Morning Transport. She is a 2018 graduate of the Viable Paradise workshop and a member of the Codex Writers’ Group. Originally from Boston, she now lives with her family in Upstate New York where she teaches yoga, knits pocket-sized animals, and misses the ocean.
Shingai Njeri Kagunda, a lover of all things soft and Black, is an Afrosurreal/futurist storyteller, writing teacher, and eternal student from Nairobi, Kenya who holds a Literary Arts MFA from Brown and is coeditor of Fantasy Magazine and cofounder of Voodoonauts. Their work has appeared or is upcoming from Baffling Magazine to Psychopomp, and in several anthologies including The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Africa Risen, Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction, and Will This Be A Problem?: Issue V. Her debut novella & This is How to Stay Alive, published by Neon Hemlock Press, won the Ignyte Award for Best Novella in 2022.
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Jennifer Hudak
Jeané: Could you give a short pitch, or logline, for “The Taste of Centuries, the Taste of Home” and speak to words that resonate most with it?
Jennifer: A word people tend to use for me is quiet. I like to write quiet stories where not so much happens externally but a lot happens internally, and “The Taste of Centuries, the Taste of Home” is a portal fantasy that deals explicitly with second-generation diaspora. The main character is a girl whose grandmother arrived in this portal universe when her mother was just a baby. It’s about trying to figure out where your home is, trying to figure out what kind of relationship you have with home—how that relationship also affects your relationship with your family.
And though it is a quiet story, it was very personal and important for me to write. My grandparents were immigrants to the United States and I don’t have a connection to eastern Europe where they were from. I also do not have a connection with Israel; a lot of Jewish people consider it their ancestral homeland and that is super problematic, but in addition to that I’ve just never had any kind of relationship with it. So there’s this feeling of, okay, where’s my home, and how do I develop that sense of place for myself.
The line in the story of choosing to be where you are sticks with me whenever I go back to it.
I feel like, in a lot of ways, when I write stories I am trying to talk myself through problems, so that was something I was telling myself at the same time I was writing it.
How do you relate your experience and understanding of diaspora to that of speculative fiction?
Speculative fiction deals a lot with changes in circumstance or finding yourself someplace—whether it is science fictional or fantastical or horrific—that is a little askew from either what the character has experienced in the past or what the reader has experienced, and that provides a lens to reflect on experiences you consider to be typical when viewed through that lens. And I feel diasporic writers have a unique relationship with that kind of writing because we already have that sense of things being a little bit askew, a little bit off-center. We’re looking back at—whether it’s our homeland or our ancestors’ homeland—from a place of remove. We’re also looking at the place where we live now with a certain sense of remove. So with that critical distance baked in, it helps me look at scenarios and situations and characters with the feeling that I can maybe turn around and see the other side that isn’t typically looked at.
What came first: the story or the sub call?—or was it something in-between?
Oh the story came first. I was so excited when I heard that khōréō was starting. I hadn’t quite finished the story, I was trying to figure out how to write it for a long time. It started with someone on a space station trying to bake traditional foods. I am not primarily a science fiction writer and I got all kind of wrapped up and confused—“Is there yeast on a space station?” [laughter] How would one do this?
So I scrapped that idea—I was drafting a portal-fantasy novel I’m now querying, struggling ’cause it was the first novel I’d ever worked on, and so how do I incorporate worldbuilding in a way that feels natural as opposed to infodumpy? I decided to write this idea as a short story in a portal universe (the same that shows up in my novel, although it’s a totally different cast of characters) as a way to enter into it.
But it was always about baking challah. That was always what I was trying to get at. I’ve baked it so many times, thinking about how that ties me back to my mother, my grandmother, so many generations of my family who have that recipe—and the fact that so much of that history is lost to me, but at the same time it’s still here.
In the editors’ letter in the issue, they talk about wanting to have a place for folks to connect who traverse the space between here and elsewhere, and your story embodies so much of that.
Thank you so much. I had a moment where I wasn’t sure if I qualified as a diaspora writer, because it’s a couple generations removed and that’s what the story is about—and I even asked Ola at the time, “Please tell me if this is not for me because I don’t want to step into someone else’s space,” and she encouraged me to send it in. It’s such an incredible environment for people of all different experiences and relationships with diaspora and with immigration. The stories—issue after issue—it’s so amazing to read, an incredible project.
Some offshoots of that, is there anything about the publishing process with khōréō that’s stuck with you, and anything about your own writing that expanded in the process?
It wasn’t a huge revise and resubmit, but I had to expand part of the story that seemed a little bit rushed when I had originally submitted it. And one of the things I loved about that process was this open-ended revision request. Some editors are very specific about the changes they want you to make, and others will say, “I’m sensing that there’s a step missing between here and here. How can we bridge that?” That’s what it was like with khōréō, I wasn’t just following directions—which is also fine, but it was an interesting process to take this story that I had worked on for a while and sit with it and try to figure out how to take it slightly deeper, how to just add one more little level there. I feel it improved the story.
It wasn’t my first publication, but it was fairly early in my career and so having that process play out the way it did was nice. I always felt super supported by khōréō. As I mentioned before, quiet is one of the words that people use about my story. Plot is not what I’m most interested in, I’m definitely a vibes writer more than a plot writer, and looking back on this revision, I thought more about pacing than I had in the past, and it is definitely something I was able to take and apply to other stories after I was done.
Also, after I was published, I had a friend who had a revise and resubmit with khōréō, and their story was eventually published. I remember they were very nervous about the whole process and so I was able to have a little Zoom chat with them and be like, “It’s gonna be okay, they’re really, really nice and really supportive,” and it worked out for them.
What are some meaningful accomplishments for you since “The Taste of Centuries, the Taste of Home” went out into the world? Also, how are you taking care of yourself on and off the page?
Well, in terms of accomplishments since then, I am a Nebula finalist this year! Which is absolutely bonkers. For a story that uses my graduate research from the late 1990s—I left academia a long time ago, and this is a nice sense of closure for me, I can finally use my PhD.
In terms of how I’m taking care of myself on and off the page, on the page I have been thinking a lot about the kinds of words that I want to have out in the world—even more so now given how scary it is. But I also feel I am in a position where if I can’t say certain things, no one’s going to be able to say certain things. I do have privilege to speak more freely than other people can and I want to use that, so the stories I’ve been trying to put out recently deal with community building and different types of resistance in response to large, external pressures. I also have been writing a lot about aging, older characters, which has become important to me, and I feel like that’s a point of view we’re starting to see more of in genre fiction, especially older not-cis men. I love talking about aging and power, and also power in community, ’cause that’s where the most power comes from.
Off the page is trickier, because it is a rough, rough time. I do not have to tell anyone that. I have been trying to make connections with my local communities and my online communities the same way that I’ve been writing about. That is the way for me, the thing that energizes me the most and makes me feel the most optimistic—if that is such a thing I can feel now—is in community. And it’s spring, so trying to get offline as much as possible, and I love getting fingers in the dirt and growing things and just trying to remind myself that the world is a big place, we contain multitudes, and there are other people out there for us, with us, even if they’re not directly with us.
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Shingai Njeri Kagunda
Jeané: What’s a short pitch, or logline, you would give for your story “A Little History of Things Lost & Found” and what words resonate most with it?
Shingai: It is a story about our relationship to the land and the history of resistance both on the land and as Black people—specifically as Kenyans. There’s a lot of grief, of sitting with a past that is filled with a violence outside of our control, and trying to create healing and reconciliation through that. Learning from the trees, the plants, the earth, the land about how that reconciliation is possible, and the story goes back in time to a precolonial relationship to the land to look for those answers.
Moving on into that, how does that story reflect your experience and understanding of diaspora, speculative fiction, and their crossings?
It comes back to a point of collectivity, it’s this understanding of ubuntu—I am because you are, because we are, and seeing the “we” as not just human. If you’re talking about diaspora, and the Black diaspora specifically, one of the things that connects us is our relationship to a spiritual history that is in conversation with the whole Earth. And I’ve just watched Sinners, so I’m also thinking about hoodoo practices, and how I see that reflected in Gikuyu spirituality, which is my tribal spirituality. Just the connections across Black diaspora when it comes to imagining—and speculative fiction as a place to call on those spiritual elements that we have access to and to invoke them in a way that can’t be questioned.
When you were imagining this story, did the writing come first or the sub call from khōréō?—or was it something in-between?
It was definitely something in-between. I was already thinking about writing stories about talking trees because I love trees, and my own relationship to trees has metamorphed, especially as I’ve been through personal loss and grief. And I started doing a lot more research into the relationship between trees and the afterlife in Gikuyu spirituality—the Mugumo tree is our tree of life. I was thinking about my traditional, tribal history of trees as a gateway to the afterlife, even though I was based in the diaspora, in America, when writing this story. My cousin had passed away, and there was a whole encounter I was having with this tree multiple times a week, thinking about the tree as a portal to my cousin.
So the sub call felt like an affirmation to write the story and to finish it. And the editing process was handled with so much care, which is something I really appreciated working with khōréō—even though there was cultural specificity, there was permission for the story to speak to diasporic interpretations of spirituality.
What’s stuck with you from that process? Also what expanded in your writing, or what did you learn? The story seems grounded in those principles—and it’s something that I definitely see echoes of in your work since then.
This is such a good question ’cause I’ve never thought about how I give myself permission with the stories that I write. But I draw a lot from historical events, and after this story, I allowed myself to continue incorporating both the specificity of those historical events and the broad imaginings of what is possible.
I’m interested in the ability to move between the very specific to the more universal, and I think that comes across in terms of engaging with time. In moving to a very specific time in the Karura Forest’s history, which is the forest I’m speaking about in the story, and then widening the scope and thinking about the nation-state as a whole: Kenya’s history of “development” that completely changed our relationship to the land and to ourselves, and how that was ingrained in the culture of protest that came up after.
Also, with nonlinear time, being able to go back and forth between these historical moments and also telling a whole history of the main character Muta, Muta’s relationship to her family, how she becomes an adult and a parent, so by the end of the story you’re with her daughter in the forest, and it feels like the scale of time is expanded.
That aspect of nonlinear time is something I appreciate about this story, and I hadn’t really experienced it until I read it. You would think in speculative fiction, right, anything is possible, but there’s this weddedness to linear notions of time—the beginning, the climax, the end—and the past is never really the past. The future is also carried in the breath of this moment.
Okay, writer. “The future is also carried in the breath of this moment”—What?! [laughter] Aligned.
You’ve been doing many things since this story went out into the world, what are some of those accomplishments? And how are you taking care of yourself on and off the page?—Everything is burning, but we still gotta eat three meals a day and do all the things.
I’m not good at talking about my own accomplishments, but this is something I’m trying to get better at and I appreciate the question, especially coming from you. What’s happened since I published this story? So much. I’ve published so many other stories since then—I’ve put together a collection that I’m about to start querying, so that’s exciting. I have been working on Voodoonauts, and Voodoonauts’ growth and expansion is one of the things I’m most proud of in my life. I’ve been teaching at various spots, both online and in person, that has been really exciting work for me. And I was the coeditor of Podcastle for a long while, and now I’m the coeditor of Fantasy Magazine which just started up again this year.
So I feel a little bit all over the place right now, my bag is in everything.
But how do I take care of myself on and off the page? I think taking care of myself is making sure that I return to the page. That’s actually something I was just talking about with my therapist, how it’s grounding for me to remind myself in the chaos of everything—because there’s been a lot of grief too in the last few years, both on a personal scale and on a political, global, international scale, and it’s been hard to figure out how to move through the world in all of that, how to stay loyal to your purpose, especially when we don’t have the support systems that we should be able to have to survive the world right now, especially in a capitalist society that is embedded with imperialism, we are constantly being attacked on every front and—
We’re being attacked on every front, and we’re minding our business so much of the time—
That part, and we have to go out of our way to insist on being in community, which is the other way that I have been taking care of myself. I know that if I don’t have community I can’t survive, and it just is what it is. And then I also think about the ways this season of the Earth has also made it hard to navigate some of the things in community that would be easier because everyone is so burnt out and so tired, and when you’re in survival mode sometimes people show the worst versions of themselves. Yeah, I have learned over the last few years that being in community is teaching myself how to stay curious—which comes up in this story—staying curious about myself, about the people that I’m in community with, and about the land that I’m on wherever I am.
The writing practice has been grounding for me because I’m doing so much else, and I have to remind myself that I started writing because it was fun. I enjoy this shit, and I think for me it’s been really wonderful to slow down and remind myself that I can’t control the outcome, I can’t control publication or the publishing industry or any of that shit, I can only control—I can’t even control the words on the page, I can just be curious about what I’m trying to write and what I’m trying to create, right?
What Lucille Clifton1 said about like, ya know, I was available and the words came to me—
Bless! Exactly, staying available, and I have to, I have to stay available to myself. I think that’s the other thing because sometimes I can be pulled in all these different directions and I forget that like, ba-by, you can’t abandon yourself in this moment, you can’t abandon yourself in this season, and not abandoning yourself is staying available to the art that you are here to make.
That’s all for questions, but if there’s anything else you wanna talk about, share, a last word?
There’s so much magic in diasporic speculative writing, and one of my favorite things about it is the ways it teaches us our connections, and we just gotta stay curious. Stay curious to what it has to offer.
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- During a conversation for her book JesusDevil: The Parables on August 12, 2023, Alexis De Veaux says, “There are sentences in that book that I can’t—I don’t even know myself,” and Ra Malika Imhotep responds, “It reminds me of Lucille Clifton, she was introducing a poem and she said, ‘These are some poems that came through and I was available.’” ↩︎
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