Okey Ndibe
From a rather young age—beginning the moment I discovered the magic of reading in elementary school—I found myself enchanted by stories, especially fiction, but also autobiographies. I’d describe myself as a passionate lifelong reader. Yet, the turn to writing arose from two serendipitous encounters with a Nigerian-British writer (Dilibe Onyeama) and, more decisively, the mesmeric American prose stylist, John Edgar Wideman. In separate encounters, both writers asked a variant of the question, “You’re writing a novel, right?”
When I fibbed to Wideman that I was, he asked to see some pages from the manuscript, offering to help get me a fellowship to start my MFA studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he was teaching. I got back to my apartment that night and, with feverish trepidation, began to write. Over the weekend I produced 20+ pages that Wideman found fascinating. It was the seed of my first novel, Arrows of Rain.
For me, writing is powerful precisely because it is a form of seduction. I am helplessly seduced by the next idea for a novel, hence mustering the energy to work at it, to persevere until the idea is realized. And then I feel my labor requited when readers find the book and confess to being transported by it. But the deeper emotional payoff is when my book enchants the reader and enlarges her moral universe.