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Twice a month, The Rumpus brings your favorite writers directly to your IRL mailbox via our Letters in the Mail programs. We’ve got one program for adults and another for kids ages 6-12. Next month, subscribers will be receiving letters from Asale Angel-Ajani and Idra Novey, and Elly Swartz and Anya Josephs, respectively.
Asale Angel-Ajani is the author of A Country You Can Leave and Strange Trade: The Story of Two Women Who Risked Everything in The International Drug Trade. She’s held residencies at Djerassi, Millay, Playa, Tin House, and VONA. She is a recipient of grants from the Ford, Mellon, and Rockefeller Foundations. She has a PhD in Anthropology and an MFA in Creative Writing. She lives in New York City.
The Rumpus: What book(s) made you a reader? Do you have any recent favorites you’d like to share?
Asale Angel-Ajani: I lived in the library, basically, so many, many books made me a reader. The first books would have been every Encyclopedia Brown and then, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, followed by Their Eyes are Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston and Mikail Bulgakov’s, The Master and Margarita. Currently, I am loving Sheena Patel’s I’m a Fan. It’s so good. I love books that flips a narrator’s insides and lays them out on the table. I also just started and so far, am enjoying, Tracey Rose Peyton’s Night Wherever We Go. I can’t resist stories that take a new look at historical truths.
Rumpus: How did you know you wanted to be a writer?
Angel-Ajani: There was a brief period in my childhood when I went to church with my grandmother. I was eight and these Sundays belonged to the Holy-Ghost. The church had everything, from speaking in tongues to spontaneous healing. Since my mother was a staunch atheist and I lived in fear of god’s wrath, I wrote an appeal to “him,” asking for my mother to see the error of her ways. The church published my letter in their Mother’s Day newsletter, on the front page, no less. I was so thrilled to see my name in print, followed by words I wrote, that I didn’t shed a tear when my mother beat me for putting her sinner’s business out in the streets. That’s when I learned the power of words and importantly, the power of an editor, because I was a terrible speller back then.
Rumpus: What’s a piece of good advice or insight you received in a letter or a note?
Angel-Ajani: I would say that the best note I received was from my twin sister, after I proudly sent her a stack of unfinished stories. She wrote back saying, “This is a good start. But none of these will be stories unless you finish them.” Sometimes we just need to be confronted with reality.
Rumpus: Tell us about your most recent book? How do you hope it resonates with readers?
Angel-Ajani: My novel, A Country You Can Leave, centers on a mother and daughter, each trying to figure out who they are and how they are supposed to be in America and to each other. The narrator is a Black bi-racial girl and her mother is a dynamic and demanding immigrant from Russia. It’s also a book about books and love and community. My hope is that readers will find a bit of themselves in the book and that the characters or the setting stays with them for a day or two. And I hope readers laugh. Laughter is always good.
Rumpus: What is your best/worst/most interesting story that involves the mail/post office/mailbox?
Angel-Ajani: My worst story was when I was a feral kid (so I think its way past the statute of limitations) running the streets of my crappy neighborhood with all the other feral kids. There was, what seemed to be, an abandoned house and one day we stole the mail and I brought it home, stuffed it in a drawer. Weeks later, my mother found it, waving all of the social security checks in front of our faces, saying we could go to prison because it was a crime to steal someone’s mail. She made all of us back to the house and put the mail back and apologize to the old woman who lived there.
Rumpus: Is there a favorite Rumpus piece you’d like to recommend?
Angel-Ajani: There is an excellent piece by Stefani Cox, “Searching for Sleeper Trains” published November 4, 2021. It’s a clever piece that does the thing I love in essays: takes seemingly disparate concerns, in this case, insomnia, trains, race and mobility, and the creative process and links them all together to explore history and meaning making. Plus, the writing is lovely.
Idra Novey is the author of Those Who Knew, a finalist for the 2019 Clark Fiction Prize, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and a Best Book of the Year with over a dozen media outlets, including NPR, Esquire, BBC, Kirkus Review, and O Magazine. Her first novel Ways to Disappear received the 2017 Sami Rohr Prize, the 2016 Brooklyn Eagles Prize, and was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction. Her poetry collections include Exit, Civilian, selected for the 2011 National Poetry Series; The Next Country, a finalist for the 2008 Foreword Book of the Year Award; and Clarice: The Visitor, a collaboration with the artist Erica Baum. She was awarded a 2022 Pushcart Prize for her short story, “Glacier.”
The Rumpus: What book(s) made you a reader? Do you have any recent favorites you’d like to share?
Idra Novey: I relished reading the same fairy tales as a child over and over, seeing how my mind would catch on a detail, or creepy allusion, that didn’t strike me when I read the same words before. Rereading fairy tales and experiencing them differently became a marker to myself of unseen ways I was changing that were imperceptible to my parents and siblings. That habit in childhood of rereading, of anticipating the discovery of a deeper meaning that had escaped me a year before, has remained a habit into adulthood. I’m still drawn to fiction with the deceptively spare prose and foreboding tone of fairy tales, to stories that shift from lightness into darkness in slippery, unexpected ways. A recent favorite book with a fairy tale quality that merits rereading is Claire Keegan’s Foster. Also Patricia Engel’s novel Infinite Country.
Rumpus: Is there a favorite Rumpus piece you’d like to recommend?
Idra Novey: Last summer, I came across Christian Detisch’s beautiful piece in The Rumpus addressed to poet Jay Hopler. Instead of a review, Detisch, who has a day job as a hospital chaplain, had the instinct to write an epistolary piece to Hopler directly, who died a month before the publication of his last book. I found it beautiful that the Rumpus staff allowed for that change in format. It’s so rare to see anyone break with the traditional review format and in this case, given that Jay didn’t live to see the publication of his extraordinary last book of poems, the direct address to him felt right, a way to recognize the haunting absence of Hopler himself in the reception of Still Life.
Rumpus: Tell us about your most recent book? How do you hope it resonates with readers?
Idra Novey: Take What You Need is a novel about familial estrangement and what role art can play in revealing the psychic cost of writing off family members and friends for years. It’s taken me ten books of translation, poetry and fiction to figure out how to write with honesty and complexity about the Southern Allegheny Highlands of Appalachia where I grew up. I hope readers will start Take What You Need for one reason and end up appreciating it most for another reason entirely. I tried to write the novel that way, open to the possibility that every character and scene would subvert my intentions and reveal something about art, trust, and libidinal forces that I didn’t anticipate at all.
This is the last month of our beloved Letters for Kids program <3
March 1 LFK Elly SwartzElly Swartz loves writing for kids, visiting schools, Twizzlers, walking her pups, and doing anything with family. She grew up in Yardley, Pennsylvania, studied psychology at Boston University, and received a law degree from Georgetown University Law Center. Elly is the author of 5 contemporary middle grade novels. Finding Perfect, Smart Cookie, Give and Take, Dear Student, and Hidden Truths (coming 2023). All her books touch on issues of mental health. Connect with Elly at ellyswartz.com, on Twitter @ellyswartz or on Instagram @ellyswartzbooks.
Anya Josephs was raised in North Carolina and is now a therapist working in New York City. When not working or writing, Anya can be found seeing a lot of plays, reading doorstopper fantasy novels, or worshipping their cat, Sycorax. Anya’s short fiction can be found in Fantasy Magazine, Andromeda Spaceways Magazine, and Mythaxis, among many others. Their debut novel, Queen of All, is an inclusive adventure fantasy for young adults available now, with the rest of the trilogy coming soon.
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