Many artists and authors are creative in multiple disciplines. What other types of art do you create?
I enjoy woodworking and baking. My apple pie recipe has won bake-offs many times!

What is the single best sentence you've ever read?
"But, O Sarah, if the dead can come back to this earth, and flit unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you in the garish day, and the darkest night amidst your happiest scenes and gloomiest hours always, always, and, if the soft breeze fans your cheek, it shall be my breath; or the cool air cools your throbbing temples, it shall be my spirit passing by." - The Last Letter of Major Sullivan Ballou

What is your biggest creative doubt?
My ideas, stories, and style aren't worth being read. Saying I'm a writer feels like a lie. I'm an imposter. How presumptuous to put myself in the same boat with Faulkner, King, Hemingway, and Poe!

What historical time would you most like to live in?
The mid to late 1800s. What an incredible time of development and discovery - the light bulb, the telephone, blue jeans! So many men and women I admire lived during this Gilded Age.

What's the last book you didn't finish reading, and why did you put it down?
I rarely do not finish a book, but WE by Yevgeny Zamyatin wore me down. A story set in the One State, where everyone lives for the collective good and individual freedom does not exist. Written in 1921, Zamyatin is considered the inventor of science fiction dystopia. The story is said to have inspired George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. I didn't finish it due to the style of writing. It was difficult to stay interested in the millionth dystopian story, even if it was the first one.

What is the most unbelievable thing that has ever happened to you?
Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss) and I were pen pals. And Stephen King once called me to talk (it's a long story). I laughed at him when he said "Hi, this is Stephen King calling from Maine." Instead of being surprised and humbled, I said "Yeah right. Nice try. Who is this really?" He's a wonderfully kind person.

What does your creative process look like?
I'm a pantser whose ideas seem to morph out of nowhere. It's like ideas are ping pong balls rattling around the box of my mind, and when two collide, they stick to form the heart of a story. I often formulate the story in my head for a long time, playing with scenes, conversations, and outcomes. I write my first draft longhand on yellow pads, and later transpose it to a WORD file on my laptop. I seem to edit and revise ad nauseam. "A work is never truly completed but abandoned"

Many artists and authors are creative in multiple disciplines. What other types of art do you create?
My penmanship is, alas, deplorable, (a spider, having dipped its legs in ink, and crawling across the page...) as is my ability to draw, but I've been through spells of being a decent enough photographer. Which led to one book-cover author portrait, and a couple of weddings, as well as a very small number of images sent to publications that I've also sent my words to.

How old were you when you produced your first work? How was it received?
I was first published at the age of 9, in the children's section of the local newspaper, completing a story prompt that the newspaper set. And I got paid the best possible way (for me, for then) - book tokens. This may have given me an unrealistically rosy idea of the publishing industry, that I've been steadily demolishing ever since.

What is the single best sentence you've ever read?
What is your most evocative memory? For a while, the smell of poorly combusted petrol or the noise of a two-stroke engine would have me clenching my jaw and stomach. This, after a rather miserable attempt to jet-ski, in a wet suit too big for me (and so unable to keep me warm) on a ski that kept choking out, throwing me repeatedly into a cold sea.

What is your biggest creative doubt?
That I might not be able to tell if something I've written is any good or not. Some stories I refuse to trunk have now done the rounds. Am I deluding myself that they are actually GOOD stories, and that I've merely been unlucky and not landed on the right editor's desk at the right time?

What historical time would you most like to live in?
Now. Or, more strictly, that short-lived period before Trump and Brexit and covid when it actually looked like things were on the up (despite climate change and all the rest!)

What is the most unbelievable thing that has ever happened to you?
Being on the 44th floor of a New York skyscraper on the morning of 9/11. Watching it unfold on the TV screens.

Whose work do you feel most resembles your own?
There are authors whose style I would like to, if not emulate, then at least match, the pithy dark humour of Vonnegut, the absurdist but still fierce logic of Douglas Adams, the clarity of writing of Asimov. But I really don't think anyone's writing resembles mine, and sometimes even mine doesn't. I try and write for the piece in question, so while certain POVs and linguistic tricks are common, as sometimes is a theme of hero avoidance and bad things just happening to my characters, I'm not sure how easy it would be to pick out one of my stories from a pile. But maybe I'm not the one best suited to that judgement.

What does your creative process look like?
A couple of scribbled lines on a bus or tube become a couple of paragraphs in a word document, and might never be looked at again, unless there's a deadline those words might just fit, or the idea keeps flowing. And then a mad polish and edit as the deadline looms, all made much harder because in between, a dozen more scribbled lines and document stubs have somehow appeared.

Many artists and authors are creative in multiple disciplines. What other types of art do you create?
Thank you so much for this question. I have always had this close admiration for photography outside of poetry as an alternative to telling my stories I cannot ordinarily, and easily tell as a reserved person. Because most times, irrespective of my discipline, I still have this modicum of talking sparingly.

So, the rest of what I should say is captured in photography as a craft in art.

How old were you when you produced your first work? How was it received?
I was 17 when I wrote what looked like my first work back in secondary school. Funny enough, it was a romance—a lovey-dovey poem I crafted as a boy without a lover. Yes. It is funny. It would beat people’s philosophy of love that one does not know the camp of thieves without rubbing shoulders with them. But, the truth is, creativities see beyond direct experiences.

Although, two of my classmates then were in a pupa relationship. I had watched them several times holding each other’s waist, looking at each other, eyeball to eyeball, and sometimes wetting their lips in the process. One question led to another, and she responded, “I see love. Nothing more”. So, I quickly titled the poem, “If You Ever Leave”, which she, my classmate’s lover took home from my desk.

Conscious enough in 2018, I wrote what was received greatly audience-wise on social medium, (media)—Facebook. It was shared by the netizens. Because it bothered the political shenanigans at home. And, it is witty to say, that a poet is a man of all weather. Sufficing to say, for me, that the ill-infested political system at home is bittersweet. Because for a poet, every door, closed, is a door, open. Call it death.

What is the single best sentence you've ever read?
My single sentence which I even repeat in my prayers is, “Everything good will come”. A sentence credited to a Nigerian-American novelist, Sefi Atta. I first read the sentence somewhere when I was worried about something before I realized it is the title of a novel by Sefi, about a girl growing into a woman in Nigeria and England. This sentence is not only loved by its conciseness, but also buried in high optimism. You need to read it repeatedly so you com to terms with the aesthetics. I wish I could frame it on the wall of my heart. I just wish I could.

What is your most evocative memory?
Yes. The crisis I know remains an indelible evocative memory that keeps returning to find me home. Although, I was not in the canoe that got wrecked; I only left my bones somewhere beside the captain.

So, it always reminds me how my feelings should not be free from worries about the dead without ritual publicity. It could come in the form of one, or two of the victims visiting my sleep and all that.

What is your biggest creative doubt?
Well, if I ever doubted my creative strength, it should be not gaining access to international magazines, or journals, let alone receiving a shipped contributor’s copy(ies) from outside my shore. It is not an inferiority complex thing.

The thing is, there is this feeling of not improving in your art after a series of turndowns from home publishing houses. They would return my email with a big blow.

But, as minutes are lost into hours, days into weeks, I began to penetrate them, and then to international.

What does your creative process look like?
Well, my creative process has always taken the shape of amoeba. I mean, I do not write like most creatives. What I am trying to say is, as a student, combining engagements of commanding meals to your table, and then, the process of creating words can be shitty, to say the least, especially at the intensity of the former.

And, as a trainee journalist, I left night a cocoon for writing, sometimes. And, I always work and pray to grow pass the stage where the basic need does not suppress the secondary ones. Perhaps, someday, I will outgrow it. Just someday.