My stories originate from those places I don’t expect them to be born. They also come at the time I don’t want them to—like when I’m about to finally attempt an eight-hour sleep. And this story is not an exception. I have always wanted to write a story with a blend of my culture—the Yoruba culture—its myths and legends, but every attempt at this had always been unrealistic.

I was very interested in the horrifying aspects of time as a menacing, material force—something that could eat you. But I ultimately became much more interested in the world in which time might function this way: the addictive substances that might be used to pacify kids who can “see” the future.

I was literally invited to six weddings in 2022, and the one I attended in Rhode Island was so lovely, I had to channel it into writing on the train back (I have stories based on some of the other weddings too.) Some of the emotional thrusts are based on my own experience, but I’ll let you guess which.

I’ve been blessed with lots of elders in my life, and as a result I tend to overestimate how long people in general tend to live. But there are weird actuarial patterns—if you can make it to certain ages, you’re likely to make it farther—and that fascinated me, especially as I look at my loved ones with hope and trepidation.

I play the guitar badly, some other instruments even more badly, and I like to get out into the woods and hike. There’s nothing like just putting miles under your feet to clear your head and get you ready to write.

here is a saying we have “Haraka haraka haina Baraka”—“Hurry hurry has no blessing.” Slowness is a value in Swahili cultures that I wanted to bring to the forefront, a value that offers more space for concepts like play to be prioritized. And of course, there is a critique of the exploitation of capitalism which shows up often in my different pieces of work.

One significant sticking point was where I had to stop to figure out enough of what warp drives did when turned on to present a valid threat to Va’s life at the end—with something like that, I couldn’t cheap out and invent something out of technobabble.

It was also fun to subvert the portal fantasy trope with that diasporic lens and think about how a kid who’s grown up in Wonderland would find Wonderland normal, and find their “human world,” which they don’t remember, the actual fantasy land.

The original inspo stems from a drunken debate about what makes Scarlett Johanson so appealing to casting directors for science fiction movies of a certain type, and how she must feel about it. What would it be like to be idealized for a form you didn’t choose?

How did “A Sojourn in the Fifth City” originate? What inspirations did you draw on? In the broadest sense, this story is a version of the science-fantasy novel that I started writing when I was fourteen years old, wrote and rewrote many times over high school and early college, but never managed to turn into […]