Saturday, December 2, 2017

Lesley Arimah: Debut book catapults Minnesota writer to stardom

Debut book catapults Minnesota author to literary stardom

Before it was even published, Twin Cities writer Lesley Nneka Arimah's first book was all the buzz.

By Laurie Hertzel Star Tribune
Photo by Glen Stubbe, Star Tribune

April 19, 2017 — 7:55am

Writer Lesley Nneka Arimah, who lives in St. Louis Park, has been drawn to “the surreal and the magical” ever since she was a child.

Lesley Nneka Arimah is determined not to let the enormous swell of praise that is engulfing her first book go to her head. She is counting, in part, on Twitter and Facebook to keep her humble.

“What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky,” a collection of 12 short stories set mostly in Nigeria, was published this month by Riverhead Books. But the accolades began months ago, when her book was named one of the most anticipated of 2017 by Time, Elle and the Chicago Tribune, among others; garnered starred reviews in Kirkus and Publishers Weekly, and earned Arimah a Q&A in the New Yorker online. Reviewers have called the book “remarkable” (NPR), “essential” (St. Louis Post Dispatch) and “dizzying and beautifully written” (Nylon).

In a headline, the Village Voice was succinct: “Lesley Nneka Arimah validates the buzz.”

This would be heady stuff for any writer, let alone a first-time author of a modest story collection, but Arimah is working hard at keeping it real.

“Whenever the great press threatens to go to my head,” she tweeted recently, “I remind myself I’ve had coffee in a martini glass more than once to avoid doing dishes.”

Arimah’s stories are populated primarily by mothers and daughters and are pierced with loneliness and dark humor.

“I think about loneliness a lot,” said Arimah, who lives in St. Louis Park. “We are conditioned to not be alone. At some point, though, even if you’re married and have children, you’re still alone inside your head.”

Most of her stories venture into the world of speculative fiction — also known as sci-fi. In “Who Will Greet You at Home,” first published in the New Yorker, the protagonist fashions a baby out of human hair and waits for it to come to life. In the title story, which was shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing, mathematicians have the power to subtract grief from other people.

Arimah has been drawn to “the surreal and the magical ever since I was a child,” she said. To be successful, “speculative fiction has to feel real. When I teach, I always talk about how this is a magical landscape but the character doesn’t know it’s magical. For the character, it’s all they’ve ever known.”

She worked for a while in a call center, selling time shares (“Having a panic attack every day, being hung up on 24/7”), a job that forms the basis for her story “Glory,” which is set in Minneapolis.

She has also worked in an accounting firm and has taught at the Loft Literary Center and at Minnesota State University, Mankato. She now writes full-time.

“I can write anywhere,” she said, even on her phone. “Because I’m on Twitter a lot, seeing my phone makes me happy. When something occurs to me, I can open a document in an app and start typing a scene.”

Arimah, 33, almost didn’t become a writer at all. She graduated from Florida State University with a bachelor’s degree in English and had figured she’d go to law school, but during her last semester she took a writing class, and that was it. Her fate was sealed.

“I didn’t even know an MFA was a thing,” she said.

She was a little nervous about telling her parents that instead of becoming a lawyer she was headed to someplace called Mankato to study writing. But her father, as it turned out, was surprisingly agreeable: He had thought of becoming a writer, too, but instead became an engineer, working all over the world in the oil industry.

An African childhood

Arimah was born in the United Kingdom and spent her early years in Nigeria. Her family immigrated to Louisiana when she was 13 — she and her sister were thrilled because they thought LA meant Los Angeles. They were a bit dismayed when the family settled down in the relative backwater of Lafayette, La.

“That was a bit of a culture shock,” she said. So for a few years she buried herself in books.

She earned her MFA in 2010, and although she had completed a number of short stories and what she now calls “a terrible novel,” she did not yet feel confident in her skills.

“ ‘The Book of Night Women’ [by Marlon James] was one of the first books I read after I graduated, and it made me realize that I didn’t know what I was doing,” she said. So she decided to stop writing for a while, and just read.

“I did a lot of reading for almost two years. That’s what people did before MFA programs, isn’t it? Reading voraciously is its own education. I’m a big advocate of reading across all genres, to better internalize good writing.”

At the time, she was living in a rented farmhouse outside Mankato, and in that isolation Twitter became her link to the world. On Twitter she is mouthy, smart, thoughtful, political and very, very funny.

Eventually, she installed an app that kicks her off Twitter after a certain amount of time. The problem wasn’t that Twitter was a time-suck; the problem was that tweeting about something she is in the middle of writing “lets the air out of the balloon.”

A swift success

After her two years of reading, things happened fast. Arimah was accepted into the Loft Mentorship program in 2012, working with St. Paul writer Mona Susan Power. Her first published story appeared in the online magazine PANK in January 2014, selected by writer and PANK founder Roxane Gay, and then a literary agent got in touch with her. And after that — well, the Commonwealth Prize, and a whole slew of grants, and publication in literary journals Catapult and Granta, as well as the New Yorker. And now this book.

Arimah’s Loft mentor, Power, said: “Lesley’s work from the very beginning just blew off the stack. From the confidence, the depth, the challenge of her writing, you can tell that there’s incredible intellect at work here. Everything is at stake — not only for her characters, but also for the reader. She reaches out beyond the page and pulls you in.

“There’s this energy that’s white-hot.”

After this story collection, who knows what Arimah will do with that white-hot energy? She signed a two-book contract with Riverhead, so there will certainly be another book. But what? A novel? Another story collection? She is not saying.

She’d love to do a graphic novel. (“I am waiting for someone to say, ‘Lesley, do you want to write a graphic novel?’ Yes, yes, yes!”) She still has that “terrible novel” in a drawer. And she’s also working on something new. Whatever it is, she doesn’t want to talk about it, doesn’t want to let the air out of that balloon.

Meanwhile, the accolades and reviews continue to pour in. She reads them, she enjoys them, she tweets about them, and then she moves on.

“I’m still cheesing off yesterday’s NPR review,” she tweeted the other day. “I grinned like a loon all through my morning bike ride.”

And later that day, on Facebook: “I’m not going to read any more reviews because this can’t be good for me.”

Turn off Twitter. Back to work.

copyright 2017 Star Tribune Minneapolis

Saturday, August 20, 2016

At the Thurber House, my dog sees a ghost...twice

I have to start this story the way I always do: by telling you right up front that I do not believe in ghosts. That said, this is a story about how I lived for a summer in the attic of a haunted house, where I experienced all kinds of ghostly occurrences - footsteps after dark, doors opening, taps running, couch cushions flying in the night.

I don't believe in ghosts, but I do believe in inexplicable occurrences, and surely the things that happened to Toby and me that summer of 1994 in Columbus, Ohio, can't all be explained away. (Although Doug thinks they can.)

Toby and I were living in an apartment in the attic of James Thurber's childhood home--a brick Victorian house on a quiet, tree-lined street--where I was the summer's writer-in-residence. The two floors below us were the James Thurber museum—a small gift shop, and then the rest of the house preserved just as it was when the Thurber family lived there in the early 1900s.

The first time the ghost made its presence known was on a Sunday afternoon just three days after we arrived. I was sitting at my computer, and Toby, who had been sleeping at my feet, awoke and wandered out of the room. Almost immediately, I heard him growl.

He was standing, frozen, in the middle of the apartment’s living room, growling at an empty chair. The white room was suffused with June sunlight. The pictures were straight on the walls, the couch tidy, the table bare except for a bouquet of flowers. There was no reason for him to be wary.

But there he stood, fixated on an empty chair - a plain wooden chair with a padded vinyl seat - baring his teeth and growling a low, rumbling growl. Clearly, he saw something I didn't see.

I tested the air but felt nothing - no ghostly presence, no eerie sensation, no chill from beyond the grave. Still, Toby's strange behavior was unnerving, and, to snap him out of it, I tossed a tennis ball down the hallway.

When I told this story to one of the house's staff members later, her eyes widened. At the Thurber House, they believe in the ghost. They've heard it walking around, and some of the previous visiting writers have heard it, too. A couple of them claim to have seen it - looking out the attic window, or sitting in a chair beside the bed.

The ghost had been quiet all winter, the staff woman told me, but it had been lively the summer before, opening cabinet doors, moving the clock radio every morning and appearing as a reflection in the glass of the framed prints on the walls. She spoke of the ghost as though it were unquestionably real.

These stories were entertaining, but they had a nasty way of coming back to me late at night. It's easy to dismiss things in the daytime, but it was a different matter after dark when the house was closed up and the staff had gone home and Toby and I were squirreled away in the attic, like Thurber's mad grandfather who lived up there 80 years before.

This was a summer of tremendous thunderstorms, and many midnights I was jolted awake by torrential rains and crashing thunder. I would lie in bed, my eyes wide open, listening to the rain drum down, and straining my ears for the ghost.

The Thurber House was built in 1873 and refurbished in 1984, when it was turned into a museum and writers' center.

During the day, the house is busy; phones ring, staff members chat and visitors pop in and out of the rooms, plunking the keys of the typewriter Thurber used at the New Yorker and staring at the family photos on the walls. But at 5 p.m., the house empties. The other commercial buildings along the street also close, and after dark Toby and I were the only living souls on the entire block.

And it was usually after dark when I heard footsteps, treading one floor below.

The ghost is not Thurber's; as a matter of fact, Thurber heard footsteps, too, and wrote about them in his story "The Night the Ghost Got In."

Legend holds that the ghost is the original owner of the house, a businessman who received a phone call one day at work. "If you go home at a certain time," the caller told him, "you'll find your wife in bed with her lover."

The businessman did go home, and he paced in indecision around and around the dining room table. Finally, he bolted up the back stairs and burst through the bedroom door - and did, indeed, find his wife with her lover. Shortly after, in despair, the man killed himself.

By 1913, when the Thurbers moved in, the house was solidly haunted. Thurber and his brother heard footsteps tromping around the dining room table and running up the back stairs. Over the next 70 years, the house was sold a couple of times and then carved up into apartments, but the ghost remained. Sooner or later, everyone who lived there heard footsteps.

I heard them, too. Every night, when I shut off the lights and crawled into bed, I left on the air-conditioner so I wouldn't have to hear them, but I heard them quite often anyway. At first it was only occasionally, but for a stretch of about two weeks in July I heard them every night, walking briskly up and down the hallway one floor below.

One night I leashed up Toby and crept with him down the attic stairs to see if we could find the source of the noise. We peeked into the silent bedrooms and the cool white bathroom on the second floor and then, spooked by nothing more than the darkness, dashed back up the stairs to the attic apartment, where I had left all the lights burning and the TV blaring, and slammed the door.

Later that month, my sister Kristin and her husband drove out from California. During their stay, we kept finding odd things out of order - couch cushions tossed onto the living room floor when we had all been sleeping; faucets suddenly running for no reason; windows that had been shut and locked somehow opened wide to the muggy July afternoon.

One afternoon I walked past a bifold door that I never used - it led to air-conditioning ducts and not much else - and found it had opened, inexplicably, since I walked past minutes before. It was the kind of door you had to pull with a jerk to open, but I hadn't heard a thing.

All of those things - cushions, water, windows, doors - I could have dismissed, had it not been for the footsteps steadily tromp-tromp-tromping on the second floor midnight after midnight.

I began soliciting guests to keep me company, and in August, my friend Joey flew out from Minneapolis. She slept in the spare bedroom at the top of the attic stairs. But at breakfast the next morning she looked rumpled and unrested. She hadn't had much sleep. She'd awakened in the middle of the night because something was violently shaking her bed.

Toward the end of summer, Toby saw the ghost again.

It was evening, and the house had been shut up for the night - the shades drawn, the lights turned off, the doors securely locked. This was my favorite time to prowl the museum. With golden late-afternoon light through the windows, the house seemed
friendlier at this quiet time of day.

I wandered into little gift shop, and Toby meandered down the hall. And then, just as before, I heard him growl.

He was two rooms away, in the museum's front parlor, staring at a velvet couch beneath a leaded-glass window. The sun was setting, and the sky outside was a dark pink and gold.

Just as before, Toby was tense. And just as before, he growled, though this time with more certainty.

I tried to walk past him to see what was alarming him, but Toby wouldn't allow it. He moved in front of me, blocking the doorway, keeping me from the couch and whatever invisible thing was on it.

It was almost a full minute before he stopped. His snarls trailed off into silence, and then he walked hesitantly to the couch and sniffed it all over in puzzlement.

It was as though whatever had been there had disappeared.

I haven't come to any great conclusions about what happened in that house that summer. I talk about it pretty freely, but whenever I do I always preface my story with the statement, "I don't believe in ghosts," before going on to mention the ways I experienced the ghost. Somehow, that doesn't feel like a contradiction.

The interesting thing is, other people don't seem to find it a contradiction, either. Invariably, they say two things. The first is, "I have a ghost story, too." And the second, which follows quickly, is, "Of course, I don't really believe in ghosts."

And that may be the only lesson here - that all of us feel both a prickle of recognition and a nudge of reassurance at our friends' supernatural stories. It was comforting to know that I wasn't alone in my experiences; my guests (except for Doug) also heard the ghost that none of us really believed existed. That made me feel sane even as I lay awake, tense and listening, night after night.

Although I still don't know what, exactly, I really heard those evenings, and though I still don't know how those windows opened or why those faucets gushed or who or what shook Joey awake, I do know this: that a lot of what happened that summer will remain unexplained and impossible to understand. And that the things we cannot understand are always the things that trouble and interest us the most.

Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Elizabeth Strout's novels are suffused with the salty tang of Maine

Elizabeth Strout's novels are suffused with the salty tang of Maine
By Laurie Hertzel Star Tribune

APRIL 11, 2014 — 3:27PM

LEONARDO CENDARMO, DML -

Elizabeth Strout

A writer can find her voice in all kinds of ways: Elizabeth Strout found hers through stand-up comedy.

She was still a young writer, had published some short fiction but not yet a novel, and was feeling “really, really stuck with my writing,” she said. “I could feel that something was not happening.”

What she needed, she decided, was some sort of intense pressure that would force her to dig deeper, be more honest. So she signed up for a comedy class.

Strout had always been curious about what succeeds and what fails in the intimate, judgmental environment of a comedy club.

“To me, it seemed to come down to whether or not what the comic said was true,” she said. “I wondered what would happen if I put myself in that kind of pressure-cooker situation. What would come out of my mouth?”

For the class’s final exam, she performed at a club in New York. “I ended up making jokes about myself for being such an uptight Puritan-like person from New England. And I thought, ‘Oh, that’s what I am. How funny. I didn’t know it!’ ”

Her comedy gig was a hit — “They asked if I wanted to audition and come back for a regular spot on Tuesday nights.” (She declined.)

More important, the comedy did the trick. Strout settled down and wrote her first novel, the bestselling “Amy and Isabelle,” about an uptight Puritan-like person from New England.

A transplanted Mainer

Strout grew up with one brother in small towns in Maine and New Hampshire. Her parents were Mainers from generations back — plain-spoken, independent and proud, perhaps instantly recognizable to anyone who has read her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “Olive Kitteridge.”

“You weren’t supposed to just sit around and talk, which I love to do. I was the family embarrassment.”

Strout left Maine after graduating from Bates College in Lewiston, spent a year at Oxford, graduated with a law degree from Syracuse University and then settled down in New York City. “I was always drawn to cities, ever since I found out about them,” she said. “I just thought, ‘Oh, wow, look at all these people!’ ”

For 30 years, she has lived in New York, and at first she thought she had mostly left Maine behind. So it came as something of a surprise when she realized that Maine was what she needed to write about. She and her husband — whom she met in New York, but who is also from Maine — keep a little apartment in Brunswick, Maine, where Strout sometimes goes to write. The apartment is tiny, so she rents a writing room above the town bookstore.

“It took me a while as a writer to realize I’m actually a very white woman from Maine. It’s my culture, what I’m familiar with and have the most complicated feelings about.”

Olive is, of course, an uptight Puritan-like person from New England. (“Blunt, flawed and fascinating,” the Pulitzer committee said.) She marches through the book, the main character of some chapters, a peripheral presence in others. But she steals every scene she’s in.

The form of the book — linked short stories — was deliberate, and unusual for a Pulitzer winner. “I learned very early on that the story is the form,” Strout said. “How you tell the story is the story. Fighting to find the form is one of the largest jobs there is, for me.

“With Olive, I understood that this had to be sort of episodic. Her nature is loud and large. It had to be told in blasts."

Her new novel, “The Burgess Boys,” which is just out in paperback, is more of a traditional narrative. “It’s denser,” Strout said. “It’s not episodic. It holds many years in it — it’s holding half a century of three lives, and a few other lives as well.”

“The Burgess Boys” examines the relationships of three siblings who grew up in a small town in Maine — two brothers who have fled for New York and a sister who has stayed behind. Their lives have been haunted by a childhood accident, when their father left the idling car to fetch the mail and the car rolled over him and killed him.

The book is about guilt and family relationships, but it is also about change and ignorance. The small Maine town where the Burgess family lived has seen an influx of Somali immigrants, and the plot is set in motion when the Burgess sister’s son throws a pig’s head into a mosque during Ramadan. (This anecdote was based on a real event in Lewiston, Maine.)

Strout spent years reading about Somali history and culture before beginning the book. “I read and read and read — probably about seven years. I read about its history and its civil war and then read a tremendous amount about the camps in Kenya. As time went by, I knew of someone in Maine who worked very closely with the Somali culture here, and he allowed me access to some of their lives.”

Strout will meet with members of the Somali community at 4 p.m. April 12 at the African Development Center in Minneapolis, and will be in conversation with author Sarah Stonich at Common Good Books in St. Paul at 4 p.m. April 13. The poster from the Somali event describes the book as “a treasure — a book in which Somalis are treated with and depicted with dignity.”

“The Burgess Boys,” first published in 2013, was widely praised. The New York Times said Strout handles storytelling “with grace, intelligence and low-key humor.” The Star Tribune mentioned the “nuanced tension in the novel,” as well as its “beautiful and detailed writing.”

Strout had already begun work on the book when she won the Pulitzer. “You know, funny thing, that old Pulitzer,” Strout said. “I’m really glad I won it, because it gave me a larger readership. Otherwise, I don’t feel like it’s changed my life at all. People asked me, ‘Aren’t you scared to write another book?’ but I’m scared to write a book every time I do it.”