For the past year, fiction writer Julie Iromuanya has been one of the two fiction editors at Tampa Review and a judge for the Danahy Fiction Prize. She has also taught First Year Writing and creative writing courses here at the University of Tampa. Julie just completed her first novel, Mr. and Mrs. Doctor, and her short stories and excerpts from her novel have appeared or are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Passages North, The Cream City Review, and other journals. Before she slips away next year for an appointment at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago—where she will have the opportunity to teach fully in her fields of creative writing/fiction and Africana literature—we want to introduce her to those of you who haven't had a chance to meet her.
Our questions for Julie caught up with her in the midst of a summer trip through Europe.
What are you doing right now?
Right now as I type I’m on a train from Paris to Madrid. I
love trains, but not this particular one. We’re cramped in a stinky four-person
sleeper cabin. It’s a little bit claustrophobic and the view is blinded by one
of our many bags propped on the windowsill. But I think under this grime is a
really good story. Trains are fascinating to me because we’re all strangers
coming from and going to different places, but for one single frame in the
story of our lives we’re in the same place and it happens to be such an
intimate place. In addition to
that, one of the things that struck me during my travels were the various local
demonstrations—marches, encampments, even festivals. I took some awful, blurry
photos that I don’t think can really grasp the energy of these different
movements so I think instead I’ll write a story.
Do you remember your
first short story?
I really don’t remember my “first” short story. What I do
remember is writing and typing up a lot of stories that involved green slime
when I was a kid—and trying, unsuccessfully, to get them published. When I was
about eight or nine I even sent one off to Putnam Press and Bantam Books. I
wrote a cover letter telling them that my favorite writer was Ann M. Martin and
I was in the third grade in Mrs. Cederholm’s class and that I had four
siblings. Putnam Press swiftly rejected my efforts with a form letter
explaining that they did not read “unsolicited works.” I still remember pulling
out my dad’s giant red Merriam-Webster to find the definition of “unsolicited.”
When I was in the fifth grade, I made my first venture into writing a longer work,
a “novel” entitled Mathew’s Journey.
I spent months writing this novel and every week Mrs. Gauthier would have the
class sit in a circle so I could read them the latest chapter. I think about it
now: What a great teacher to allow such a shy kid a few moments to share her
work with her class. It’s strange that I devoted so much of that year to
writing that novel—typing it too—and all I can remember now is that it was
about a boy who encounters ghosts.
What was it like teaching in
Tampa and editing the Tampa Review?
I love the diversity of the student body at UT. Sitting in
my freshmen writing classes, I was surrounded by students from all over the
globe—the Caribbean islands, Albania, Kenya, Eritrea, Puerto Rico, Morocco,
Kuwait, Denmark, Sweden, India, to name a few. On several occasions I witnessed
moments when students would stop to ask questions about other parts of the
world and find peculiar commonalities. I still remember a Ukrainian student who
recognized the African American slave era folk tales that we were studying as
the very stories that his grandfather used to share with him when he was
growing up in Ukraine. That was
pretty cool. With my creative writers, I really love the talent and interest
they have for writing, literature, and even the culture of writing. The Open
Mics, conferences, visiting writers series, and the student journal are all
student initiated and I love that so many students identify, not just as
students, but as writers, and I think that’s so important for developing
writers.
What's the most
important thing you try to get across when teaching or introducing a new
student to writing fiction?
I think we need to read and revise constantly, but I also
think it’s important for new writers to develop a thick skin. Rejections come
with the work we do, but we still have to press on. I tell my classes this
routinely. Then I usually remind them that our artist friends, the actors, get
rejections right to their faces but we writers get a typewritten slip in the
mail that politely declines our work; it could be worse.
Could you comment on
the story behind your piece Only in
America? It’s going to be published in the next issue of Tampa Review, and we accepted it long before we had met you—before we knew you would one day come to teach at the University of Tampa . . .
“Only in America” is taken from a couple chapters in my
novel, Mr. and Mrs. Doctor. In this
section, I set out to develop Job and Ifi, the married couple’s relationship
through their child, Victor. Most of the main conflict and tension pivots
around Victor. Job and Ifi are counterpointed. They have very different ideas
about how they see America at this point in the novel and it’s acted out through
the choices they make about how they’ll raise him. I think this is the story of
many immigrant families in America—the choices that couples must make about
their children because so much of their future is invested in them. The thing
is, Victor’s a kid, so he senses the tension in his parents’ relationship but
he doesn’t really understand why. So I thought it’d be interesting to tell
parts of the narrative from his point of view to develop some interesting
dramatic irony. And then he’s also a little bit spoiled and he’s a little bit
of a tyrant, so he enjoys mischief. He’s a cyclone from the moment he is
introduced in “Only in America.”
How much of
your own cultural background was used or reflected in that story?
Coming from an immigrant family—my parents are Nigerian
immigrants—I understand some of the questions that immigrants have to ask
themselves as they settle into a new land. In terms of the small, tangible
details of the story, I remember developing this fascination with artifacts of
Americana during garage sale season, just going through piles and piles of
kitsch and leafing through this junk in search of a prize. Some of those
objects that Victor discovers—the snow globes, the skates, the abacus—are things
that I remember from such hunts. I think of an immigrant in some ways as having
the same sort of childish fascination with the stories such objects tell about
the new culture. I don’t know if people still go to garage sales as much as
they did in the eighties, but it was an event. So the immigrant feels out of
place at the garage sale, fully immersed in the new culture, but in terms of
imagining the world of the immigrants, I tried to place them at the gatherings
where immigrants feel the most at home and I remember from growing up that the
moments when immigrant voices were the loudest happened to be at big cultural
celebrations (birthdays, for example) and pickup games of soccer in the middle
of the summer. Although it’s not so much the case with Americans, soccer has a
funny way of uniting the various immigrants.
