reprinted with permission from Work In Progress (www.workinprogressinprogress.com)
Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?
Japa & Other Stories is about Nigerian immigrants yearning for a self in America, and sometimes in other parts of the world. One character bilocates in the heat of their yearning, another folds himself into a box on a journey to the fulfillment of his deepest desire. Others embark on a treacherous trek across the Sahara Desert trying to find home in foreign cities.
Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why?
Ahamefula (in “Japa Boys & Japa Girls”). A character who shows up in two stories, and in one of the stories he appears in different locations at the same time. He is deeply mutilated and frustrating, constantly making bad, humorous decisions. From the POV of a reader, a fantastic companion on the page.
And which character gave you the most trouble, and why?
Rasaki. The protagonist who travels to Russia in “You Illegals” to watch the World Cup. Throwing a Nigerian character into a landscape I had never visited presented obvious problems of believability. Trying to figure out how he might act in his interactions with Russian culture, and the Russian people was difficult to accomplish. Eventually I read hundreds of blogs written by Nigerians living in Russia, and watched Vlogs by Nigerian immigrants in Russia to become comfortable enough to render this character with the kind of easy intimacy I look for in characters when I read fiction.
Which story did you most enjoy writing?
To be honest, I enjoyed writing all the stories, though I might be slightly partial to “Japa Girls” in which a character bilocates.
Why?
I like working out the supernatural in fiction. It’s such an important fabric of my understanding of the world, and also something which I do not fully understand—so it’s always giving. I believe every human being is part-spirit; whether you believe it or not, you’re what you are. The uncanny is a kind of wildness that attacks our sense of order, though we find it infinitely stimulating.
And, which story gave you the most trouble, and why?
Two stories gave me the most trouble. The frame story, “To You Americans,” and “Spain’s Last Colonial Outposts” where I switch perspectives—third person/ first person plural. Frame stories are by their very nature like matryoshka dolls. A story inside a story. Rhythm inside rhythm. The outside story and the inside one have to be expanding at just the right pace so that, in the end, the story doesn’t tilt. That’s usually difficult to do.
Switching narrators in a story can be confusing for the reader. So again, the rhythm has to be weighed right. The switches happening in a way that feels necessary, that makes the reader believe they’ve received a burst of energy and promise.
Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.
In the three years before I won the Flannery O’Connor, my then-agent tried to sell my collection to several publishers with little success. I entered a few book contests, too. At some point it occurred to me that I needed to rearrange the stories in the collection and write new ones. I had a couple of stories that had been published in stellar journals but didn’t really belong in the book. It took tremendous courage to cut them out. I sought out a unity in the collection. It took about six months to arrange the stories in what I thought was the right order. Then I prayed for success.
What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?
Without conflict fiction is just a boring rendition of details. Which is another way of saying, your character must yearn for something. Every human being wants something. And to seek is to suffer.
My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?
The incredible amount of research I had to do for each story. For “Urban Gorilla” I had about a hundred pages of research. Images included. I’m a very visual writer.
What’s something about your book that you want readers to know?
This is serious fiction that also makes you laugh. I appreciate humor in fiction. One of my wrting professors, Elizabeth McCracken used to say, “Don’t be afraid to be funny.”
Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book?
I drank a mix of hibiscus tea, plus ginger and garlic while writing this book. It improved my eyesight considerably.
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READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: https://iheomanwachukwu.com
ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://ugapress.org/book/9780820367279/japa-and-other-stories/
READ A STORY FROM THIS BOOK, “Hosanna Japa Town”: https://oxfordamerican.org/authors/iheoma-nwachukwu
Winning story: “As To Your Comment That It Could Have Been Worse” by Caridad Moro-Gronlier.
Winning Poem: “A Black Poet Looks Back at his Boyhood” by Oak Morse.
uzanne Cleary’s Crude Angel, her fourth full-length poetry collection, was published in November 2018 by BkMk Press (U of Missouri-Kansas City). Beauty Mark (BkMk 2013) won the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry, and also received the Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize and the Patterson Award for Literary Excellence. Keeping Time (2002) and Trick Pear (2007) were published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. Poets Marilyn Nelson and Robert Cording selected her collection Blue Cloth as winner of the 2004 Sunken Garden Poetry Festival chapbook competition.
Susan Tekulve is author of Second Shift: Essays and In the Garden of Stone, winner of the 2012 South Carolina First Novel Prize and a 2014 Gold IPPY Award. She’s also published a short story collection, Savage Pilgrims, and two fiction chapbooks, Washday and My Mother’s War Stories. Her work appears in Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, The Georgia Review, Connecticut Review, The Louisville Review, Puerto del Sol, New Letters, and Shenandoah.
Yellow Bird by Shannon Bowring. Bowring’s work has appeared in numerous journals, has been nominated for a Pushcart and a Best of the Net, and was selected for Best Small Fictions 2021. Her debut novel, The Road to Dalton, is forthcoming from Europa Editions. Shannon lives in Bath, Maine. 
Feathers and Wedges: A Golden Shovel by Karen Kilcup. A New Englander with old farming roots, Karen Kilcup is the Elizabeth Rosenthal Excellence Professor of American Literature, Environmental & Sustainability Studies, and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at UNC Greensboro. Her forthcoming poetry book The Art of Restoration was awarded the 2021 Winter Goose Poetry Prize. She’s an avid cook, runner, and rock climber who has difficulty resisting the urge for More Garden.
Paraiso by 
El Roca by Hayley Nivelle. 
Santa Monica by 
If I Get Alzheimer’s: Instructions for My Wife by Justin Hunt. Hunt grew up in rural Kansas and lives in Charlotte, NC. His work has won several awards and appears in a wide range of publications in the U.S., Ireland and the U.K., including Five Points, Barrow Street, River Styx, New Ohio Review, Nimrod, Terrain.org, and The Bridport Prize Anthology. 
Elixir for Knowing When To Surrender by Katherine DiBella Seluja. Seluja is the author of Gather the Night, and co-author of We Are Meant to Carry Water. Recent work can be found in FENCE, and upcoming in Cutthroat and Thimble. Her third book of poetry, Point of Entry, will be published by UNM Press in 2023.
a mother mulls her son’s self-injuries by Dean 
The judge for the 2022 Julia Peterkin Flash Fiction contest is Cary Holladay. Holladay has published six short story collections, including Horse People, The Quick-Change Artist, and most recently, Brides in the Sky, as well as two novels and over 100 short stories and essays in journals and anthologies, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Arkansas Review, Five Points, The Georgia Review, The Hudson Review, Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Sewanee Review, Southern Review, and Tin House. Her awards include an O. Henry Prize and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is Professor Emeritus at the University of Memphis. She lives in Virginia.
The judge for the 2022 Julia Peterkin is Ashley M. Jones. Jones is Poet Laureate of the state of Alabama (2022-2026). She received an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University (FIU), where she was a John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Fellow. She is the author of three poetry collections: REPARATIONS NOW! (Hub City Press, 2021); dark // things (Pleiades Press, 2019), winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry; and Magic City Gospel (Hub City Press, 2017), winner of the silver medal in poetry in the Independent Publishers Book Awards. Her poems and essay appear or are forthcoming in many journals and anthologies, including CNN, the Academy of American Poets, Poetry Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, Prelude, and The Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, among others.
