Macro Minds, Micro Talks with Mandira: Frances Ogamba

Frances Ogamba

Interview by Mandira Pattnaik

Frances Ogamba is a Mercatus Center’s Don Lavoie Fellow at George Mason University, a Tin House Scholar, a Jacobson Scholar at the Hawkinson Foundation for Peace and Justice, and a Miles Morland Writing Scholar. She is a recipient of the Gulliver’s Travel Grant, Diversity Grant from Horror Writers Association, Walter H. Judd Travel fellowship, the COGS Research grant, the AKO Caine Prize editorial fellowship and the College of Liberal Arts fellowship from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

Hello Frances, congratulations on receiving the 2025 Gulliver’s Travel Grant from Speculative Literature Foundation in April. It’s incredible that you straddle multiple genres and categories in your writing and have won many awards—your journey is truly inspirational. I know how busy you are, so I’m super thankful that you chose to do this interview with us. I’d love to start with your current project. What are you currently working on?

FO: Thank you, Mandira, for your kind words. I am equally in awe of your journey as a writer. I read your flash stories in The Rumpus and, as always, I admired the precision of your writing, and the way small, seemingly ordinary objects become powerful anchors of conflict in your stories. I could go on about everything I love in your work but let me turn to your question.

When I am writing, I tend to move between several projects at once. However, the project that has held my attention most steadily is a short story in which I am thinking about perception in relation to time. I am interested in how, at the end point of an incident – death, for example – we begin to dissect everything we felt, thought, or did beforehand. We say, “I saw it coming” or “I felt it” or “Maybe that was why I lost my appetite that afternoon.” The tingling hairs, the persistent headaches, the cold feet: everything acquires meaning and begins to point toward precognition, though this particular form of knowing exists only in retrospect.

In the story, what comes after intimates what came before. A disembodied narrative voice re-examines the near-misses and the entirely missed signals that continually dissolve into the steam of the present. It is afterwards, rather than beforehand, that we begin to make sense of all the information the universe may have been relaying to our bodies and minds while events were still unfolding.

Thank you, Frances. I adore the profundity of your statement: “A disembodied narrative voice re-examines the near-misses and the entirely missed signals that continually dissolve into the steam of the present.” I was reading your latest short story “To Have and to Hold” in the spring Issue of Hopkins Review. It opens with “The door yawns open. A burst of sound behind Enyim makes her straighten. A covey of barefoot and scantily clad children who live in the houses clumped in the narrow rows in Iwofe neighborhood smiles back at her.” I loved the sensory details here. Could you take our readers through your writing process?

FO: Thank you, Mandira. In the earlier draft of “To Have and to Hold,” Enyim, the main character, walks to her door and turns the key several times. She is so excited to be home with her help meet that, in her enthusiasm, she temporarily forgets the mechanics of a door she has passed through for years.

The main question my first editor asked was why it took Enyim so long to enter the house, and what proximal or distal conflict was seeded by her struggle with the door. When I cut that paragraph, the story began directly at the doorway. The revised opening is therefore infused with overlapping conflicts that become central to the story. First, Enyim is holding her help meet, a bizarro version of the commercialized resurrection technology trending in this transhumanist society. Second, the neighbourhood children are already present. They later become vital contagonists, even as they remain the primary recipients of Enyim’s altruism.

As with many of my stories, the world-building and the story’s eventual development benefitted immensely from the logical questions posed by my workshop friends. One such line of questioning concerned the story’s central premise of human resurrection: what the visibility or invisibility of help meets reveals about product versioning and social status; how the version Enyim can afford becomes a source of conflict; and how these distinctions situate the story within broader questions of surveillance and privacy.

It is great to know about your process, and how stories shape up. Surveillance and privacy are huge concerns in today’s world. I find it amazing when contemporary writers reflect current issues in their work. In a 2019 interview after winning the Koffi Addo Prize for Nonfiction, you said: “I would change how the world perceives women.” Would you like to elaborate for our readers?

FO: It’s interesting how 2019 now feels like a different era. Considering that 2020 followed closely on its heels, and that the world was both hurting and evolving in so many ways, my mind must have been turning over a particular issue or development when I said that.

Speaking from the present, however, changing how the world perceives women would mean representing women in every possible variation, so that no single archetype of womanhood invalidates all others. Womanhood is often normalized as passive and demure. It is this imperial, reductionist narrative that I question: the rigid line drawn between the ideal woman and the flawed one, when the supposed “flaw” is sometimes no flaw at all, but simply a refusal to conform to society’s prescribed performance of womanhood.

In writing about women, I chronicle the happy, resilient, vengeful, and shadowed lives of women navigating the terrain of motherhood, both chosen and imposed. In Call Her No One, there are two distinct women. The aunt defies society’s understanding of the goodness expected of women, while the girl’s earlier rejection of motherhood alongside her innate passivity complicates her character, placing her both within and outside of these conventions.

Egoabia in “The Grit Born” yearns for the experience of mothering but chooses an unconventional path toward it. She later rejects that experience through an act that places a question mark over her womanhood. Some of these stories blur the lines between the supernatural and the real in order to examine the strange, transformative, and arduous undertaking of motherhood. That blurring becomes one of the primary tools with which I question the very meaning of “woman.”

Your writing is deeply explorative of African society. In The Caste of Body Parts (Kalahari Review; 2019), a poignant essay about the woman’s place in a highly patriarchal society, you ask “Is something wrong with being young and unmarried and female in this Africa, my Africa?” Please tell us how this essay came about?

FO: Oh, I was living in Port Harcourt at the time and commuting to work by public transportation. In most Nigerian towns and cities, buses and taxis are how people get around. In the essay, I was drawing from my own experiences in those spaces, as well as from watching how other people occupied them. Nigerian cities are clamorous, and most of the clamor comes from human voices. Public transportation often becomes an interesting way of listening to a town or city.

Once, after I got out of a taxi at an intersection and demanded my change, the driver called me a prostitute. In the heat of the argument, he claimed that he knew who I was because we had spent the night together. In the essay, I was trying to disassemble the roots of the shame I felt and to examine how that shame permits, and sometimes even emboldens, the audacity of men like that driver. I was also examining the automatic protection often granted to women who wear wedding bands, and the way that protection is denied to unmarried women. It is as though the ring determines the degree of access others feel entitled to have to a woman, though the nature of that access changes according to the part of town and the situation at hand.

Writing is famously a solitary act, and you have previously observed in a conversation that “writing is such a lonely path that it is nearly impossible to walk alone." Please tell our readers about your writing journey and how communities have helped?

FO: When I first started writing, I did not know that it was possible to have people devote their time and attention to my manuscripts and offer thoughtful, helpful suggestions. Facebook was my first introduction to other writers, as well as to workshops and literary festivals taking place across the African continent.

Short Story Day Africa ran a microfiction contest on Facebook. I submitted pieces to those contests and met other young writers in the comment sections. Through them, I learned about workshops and literary festivals, and I formed friendships with people with whom I exchanged stories.

Chinaza Attamah, a very brilliant writer, was one of my earliest readers. From him, I learned what to look for in a story and how to offer thoughtful feedback. Along the way, I have gathered more kindred spirits: Kasimma, Mubanga Kalimamukwento, Gloria Odary, Tega Oghenechovwen, and peers from Tin House, Kimbilio, the University of Minnesota MFA program, and other workshops and writing communities. Then, there are the editors who turn a story over carefully, making sure its inner workings are well-oiled. I may write in solitude, but I never write alone.

Finally, if you had to offer three bits of advice to emerging writers, what would those be?

FO: I came to understand the expansive world of stories through reading, so, my first piece of advice is: read. Read everything. As new writers, our minds often froth with stories, and sometimes we would rather write them than read. But when there is dearth of reading, the language of a writer begins to deflate, along with their sense of style and voice. Our imagination becomes impoverished, and I think that is a terrible thing.

The second thing is to keep returning to the practice of writing, even on difficult days. Once we become accustomed to reading widely, writing can begin to feel daunting. There is so much happening in the world of books, so much we want to discover at once. Impostor syndrome may also creep in, making us feel that our messy first drafts fall far short of the polished books and stories we admire. Reading can begin to feel easier and less risky, while, with each passing day, we grow more judgmental of our own work. I would say: take the risk. Begin afraid. What is the worst that could happen? My friend Mubanga Kalimamukwento says, “The job of the first draft is to exist.” So let it be messy. Let it be imperfect. But let it exist.

Lastly, when you read something you love or find interesting, take the opportunity to slow down and study why you love it. This is where we begin to read like writers. What is it about the tension, pacing, character depth, structure, or overall style that makes the story resonate? You can invite writer friends to examine stories with you and discuss why they are working – or why they are not.