heads of the colored people by nafissa thompson spires

I’ve had the best year of my life professionally in many ways but, in terms of my, it’s been extremely difficult and the tour was very gruelling. I’m also writing about it in the novel I’m currently working on. My own pain was pressing and I couldn’t get away from it. In a Paris Review essay you sa y: “It means something to me to be able to produce when something is daily trying to take me out.” Could you tell us more about that? She’s seeking therapy to figure out why she has these rage issues. Fatima is dealing with endometriosis, Marjorie is dealing with trauma from child abuse and probably has borderline personality disorder, but the story doesn’t diagnose her. The body may look very well, but you don’t know what’s going on inside it. Several of the central characters are suffering from emotional trauma. In phrenology – there’s a head injury in one of the stories – and heads in psychology too a lot of the characters are dealing with acute mental issues. But I ended up thinking about heads more generally. As a child, I would scare myself looking at the pictures in medical books. I’ve always been deeply afraid of bodies. I didn’t set out to write a book about the body – I think that was all subconscious stuff that was trying to come out of me, that I was fighting against. The stories also explore aspects of physicality. You’re reshaping an ongoing conversation. I wanted to see more stories about awkward, nerdy black people, and black people who were the only ones in a particular space, and what it meant to navigate the many different kinds of identity construct. I’d grown up feeling like I was the only black person like myself, though of course that wasn’t the case. I want to read more about people who have had experiences similar to my own.

I wanted to think about what it means to be a black person today but also respond to what James McCune Smith was theorising almost 200 years ago.

Much of it is dealing with the same issues we’re dealing with today – and now we have a president who is very vocal about his racism. My husband is a professor of literature and he writes a lot about McCune Smith and other 19th-century writers who were publishing sketches in Frederick Douglass’s newspapers – he would come downstairs excited and talk about this research. The title of your collection comes from the 19th-century abolitionist James McCune Smith and his sketches Heads of the Colored People. The collection has been shortlisted for the Gordon Burn prize. Her debut short-story collection, Heads of the Colored People, which portrays the lives of contemporary African Americans, was described by Booker prize winner George Saunders as “vivid, fast, funny, way-smart and verbally inventive”. Nafissa Thompson-Spires was born in San Diego, California and studied creative writing as a graduate student at the University of Illinois and Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

Heads of the colored people by nafissa thompson spires