Telling Their Stories as They Demand It
Kesha Ajose Fisher talks about her award-winning debut collection.
BY MARY RECHNER
KESHA AJOSE FISHER’S debut story collection No God Like the Mother won the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction at the 2020 Oregon Book Awards. The girls and women at the heart of each story face difficulties, some drastic—the aftermath of a kidnapping, sexual assault—and some insidious—the underestimation of a young mother, casual racism. Fisher was born in Chicago, raised in Laos, Nigeria, and now lives in Oregon. In a recent interview on KATU’s Afternoon Live, she discussed how her social justice work with immigrant and refugee communities has influenced her writing, along with her hope that No God Like the Mother “sparks a conversation that leads us to more empathy.”
Mary Rechner: In your stories the physicality of the characters, their conflicts, and a sense of place are vividly evoked.
Kesha Ajose Fisher: When I lived in Nigeria, I grew up hearing stories that used imagery to pull us in, and I wished for the oratory powers of the elders, but I was too shy for it. The next best thing was to conjure my own magic by paying homage to the storytellers of my past.
Rechner: Some of the stories in No God Like the Mother are written in first person point of view and some in third person. Many are written in past tense, but a couple are written in present tense. How do you choose?
Ajose Fisher: The easiest way for me to show respect to all of these characters was to let them lead me. During revisions, I provide my opinion and then I wait to see how it lands.
Rechner: What is your writing process like? How do you balance doing what you love with the part(s) you don’t?
Ajose Fisher: I wrote No God Like the Mother while working full time, raising four children, and taking evening classes. When possible, I slept. I don’t know how I did it. I am only certain that being married to the most supportive man in the world helped. And yes, it still sucked. These days, I schedule time to write uninterrupted (as much as is possible with children and a very needy dog) from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. I turn off all devices, insert my earplugs, read for about a half hour to warm up, then I write. Whether it is good, bad or ugly, I put something down. Those hours feel like minutes when my alarm goes off and I must return to my mommy duties, but that’s what my life currently allows. With all of that said, and maybe because I am a glutton for punishment, I do not outline anything I have ever written. It stresses me out. It resembles incomplete work. There was no time to plan to write, so I would dive in and hope for the best. And I much prefer the process of creating stories organically.
Rechner: How do you approach revision?
Ajose Fisher: I am always revising stories in my head. It’s the worst, particularly after I have submitted a project for publication. I don’t think there are any perfect stories and I am certain I’ll be attached to a notepad on my deathbed because I cannot stop the voices in my head from always wanting more.
Rechner: What are some things you consider when choosing where to begin and end a story? How has your approach changed over time?
Ajose Fisher: When I started writing at thirteen, I would wait for the first line to come to mind, then build a story from it. That has not changed. When I’m done, I know I’m done only when I hear the gentle whispers from my ancestors, “Enough already.”
Rechner: Do you have a favorite part of writing?
Ajose Fisher: What I most enjoy about the writing process is when an idea pops into my head. I love this beginning phase of creating because I don’t yet know anything about the world that’s asking me to build it. It still fascinates me when I ‘complete’ a project and my thoughts now have faces and challenges and smells and experiences that I’ll only get to encounter through them. It is so much fun.
“When I asked her to sketch something, not knowing if we would use it or not, she immediately said, ‘I’ve got it. You will love it.’ When she showed me a piece of paper with a woman as Mother and the moon for its feminine energy, I knew she was right.”
Rechner: Are there any parts about writing you like less?
Ajose Fisher: I don’t necessarily dislike this part, and this is an odd confession, but I have cried after reading something I wrote. I trust my instincts and use them to guide me, so when I have an emotional reaction to a story, I know it will work. In the title story, “No God Like the Mother,” when Ayomide turns back to see if her dead mother is behind her, I was crushed. It still crushes me. When Emilola and Kareem in “The Silence Between Us” meet again, I wanted the moment to last forever. Yes, I possess the power to fix it, but I fear the voices in my head will go silent if I don’t tell their stories as they demand it of me. And I still don’t like how easily I cry at my own work.
Rechner: You are working on a novel. How would you compare and contrast writing stories with writing a novel?
Ajose Fisher: Short stories are more difficult to write because of the pressure to compress whole lives into ten to twenty pages and leave the reader feeling complete. Where I found myself in trouble with this collection was when I was telling the particularly distressing stories, like “Thief” and “The Bride Price.” All I wanted to do was pour out the pain and leave, but I could not. I did my best to depict all of the horrors in those stories in as few words as possible for my comfort, but then I received feedback that people wanted more, and my response has always been that it hurts too much to walk in those character’s shoes. Their stories needed to be short and sweet, and since neither could be pleasant, I chose to keep them succinct though it felt almost impossible at times.
I am currently working on and thoroughly enjoying writing my next book. It is a novel about my American mother who was the first in her family to return to Africa since the slave trade. She was an incredibly strong woman, but she was also irrevocably damaged. What I discovered in researching her life and trying to make sense of her life with words was that no one becomes that broken if the world had not been such a hard place to live in, and I hope to tell her story with brutal honesty to reflect the brutality in which she lived her very short life.
So to answer your question: I think I prefer the novel. There is more room for flexibility and space to hide mistakes.
Rechner: How did the cover of your book come about? It’s gorgeous, and I noticed you thanked one of your kids for it in your acknowledgements.
Ajose Fisher: My sweet and darling daughter, Omodara Ajose-Fisher, created the art for the cover. She is a recent Portland State graduate and a phenomenal artist. For as long as I’ve been writing No God Like the Mother, she has known that I was working on a project about mothers and motherhood. When I asked her to sketch something, not knowing if we would use it or not, she immediately said, “I’ve got it. You will love it.” When she showed me a piece of paper with a woman as Mother and the moon for its feminine energy, I knew she was right. And yes, I cried. So what, I feel things.
Rechner: Can you describe the process of working with Inkwater Press? Was there anything you learned or discovered in the editing process?
Ajose Fisher: Inkwater Press always had a booth at every street event I attended when I first moved into my neighborhood. My husband would go talk to the acquisitions person and say, “This is Kesha, she has written an amazing book.” I was always mortified, but he is my biggest cheerleader so I knew he would not stop unless I submitted it. After three years of running into Inkwater at events, I went in. I panicked about having to pay to publish because everything I had heard about the industry warned that I shouldn’t. Again, my husband insisted that I bet on myself. I did.
Then there was the crippling terror. I had written about African experiences, and most vividly about childbirth and loss and child abuse and death and love and hope too, but I feared my editor, Andrew Durkin, both male and non-African, would drag a huge red X across all the pages and order me to never write again. He returned the manuscript with suggestions but mostly praise and I still convinced myself he was also just being nice. We worked together to get the book into top shape, and it took about six months.
After that the process felt like we were expecting a baby—from choosing the art for its “room,” naming and renaming it, and fearing the unknown, terrified that no one would see its beauty. Even the elation once it was in my hands was exactly reminiscent of childbirth, and I am so proud of the work we’ve done. I say “we” because I know No God Like the Mother would still be just letters on a screen stored away someplace if I did not have my tribe of believers, and for that, I am grateful.
Rechner: Who are some writers whose work you admire? What is it about their work that you find compelling or that inspires you?
Ajose Fisher: I was completely enamored with the poetic writing style of Akwaeke Emezi in Freshwater and I have their new book The Death of Vivek Oji in my queue. I recently read and reviewed for a local newspaper The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abi Dare. I was both fascinated and inspired by how the author successfully narrated the book entirely in pidgin English. In my collection, I use pidgin in all the dialogue for “No More Trouble.” It is about a young couple who find themselves needing to make a life-altering decision. In order to be authentic to the lives of these characters who were both abandoned as children, uneducated, surviving on tenacity alone, I wanted to let them tell their story without shoving conventional English down their throats. My fear in attempting the feat was that I did not feel I had permission to do so, and in turn I included pidgin solely in their dialogue. At times, when I am feeling rebellious, I might allow the narrator to slip a few words into the general storytelling, but never as deftly as Abi Dare.
It worked for some [readers] and for others, it did not. I’ll end with this, criticism can at times feel more restrictive than constructive so my advice to anyone starting or feeling stagnant in their writing is to write what moves them, do their research, and grow thick skin. I stand by the belief that when I am called to tell a story, the words come through me though they are not necessarily of me. Writing allows me to experience worlds and lives I will never live. It is the closest thing to magic. So if I feel like visiting the moon one day, I just might and when I tell you about it, you’ll have no choice but to believe me.
Thanks, be well, and please remember to vote.
Kesha Ajose Fisher’s debut story collection, No God Like the Mother, won the 2020 Ken Kesey Award for Fiction at the Oregon Book Awards. She has also earned a number of awards for other essays and stories she has written over the years, including the Phoenix literary magazine’s Editor’s Choice Award for Short Fiction in both 2011 and 2012. Her writing has been published in several online and print collections, and in such publications as Multicultural Familia, Alchemy, and Beyond Black & White.
Mary Rechner is the author of the novella The Opposite of Wow published in the Hong Kong Review and the story collection Nine Simple Patterns for Complicated Women (Propeller Books.) Her fiction has appeared in publications such as Harvard Review, Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Kenyon Review, and Washington Square. Her criticism and essays have appeared in The Believer, Oregon Humanities, and the Oregonian.
