Casting Shadows: An Interview with Vincent Anioke by Contributing Editor Michele Finn Johnson
“A beautiful night with friends from which I’m already contemplating new stories.” - Vincent Anioke
This week’s interview for our tenth anniversary series is with Vincent Anioke, a Split Lip contributor. We published his short story, The Smallness of Asking, in 2021. Split Lip's Fiction team fell in love with Anioke’s unique voice and lush language, as well as the strong sense of place in his piece. Vincent Anioke (@AniokeVincent) has stories in or forthcoming in Passages North, Fractured Lit, Bending Genres, Carve, Pithead Chapel, and others. He is exactly six of these seven things: a Nigerian-Canadian, a gigantic Taylor Swift fan, a Software Engineer at Google, an earnest believer in true love, an avid caretaker of plants, a two-time Nigerian representative at the International Mathematics Olympiad, and a horror movie connoisseur. His short story, Perfect Little Angels, won the 2021 Austin Clarke Fiction Prize. We spoke via email about math, bubbling stomachs, and secrets.
Michele Finn Johnson: Vincent, The Smallness of Asking was a standout in the Split Lip fiction queue and drew a quick "yes" from our editorial team. We all became fast fans of yours, and I personally enjoyed collaborating with you throughout the editorial process. Can you tell me a little bit about what it was like for you to feature your work in Split Lip?
Vincent Anioke: There’s much I admired about Split Lip even before my first submission: the resonant stories and accompanying art, the gorgeous website, the passionate promotion of past contributors. But my favorite thing is easily the care and sensitivity of the revision process. I loved that the editorial feedback is so thoughtfully specific yet so non-prescriptive.
MFJ: That's so great to hear! Non-prescriptive feedback is so key to us—keeping the power of the story within the author's control while we gently nudge the edges or poke at pressure points. I love editing, and working with you was a complete pleasure. I'm glad we were able to make the editorial process a positive one as opposed to a scary experience! Speaking of scary, what scares you?
VA: The dark, unless there’s a sliver of closet light.
The end of long-term relationships, especially the mundane and unceremonious kinds, so prone to slow deaths.
Confined spaces. My pulse quickens if an elevator takes a second too long to reopen. In childhood, I watched a video about dug-up coffins—they found scratch marks on the inside. Imagine the dark. Air turning to sandpaper in your throat. Bloody nails clawing fruitlessly against hardwood.
The idea that culture excavates its rot slowly, slower than a lifetime. This fear manifests in questions I often ask myself. Will Nigeria ever have a pride parade? Could I ever march on the streets of my home country hand-in-hand with a lover? Did I do the right thing by coming out? I see the pain it’s caused. I see the struggle to reconcile this knowledge with lifelong cultural beliefs about the shape of love. I see the death of daydreams involving pretty in-laws and mischievous grandkids. I’m scared that they’ll die not fully knowing me. They’ll die feeling like they failed me. Failed themselves.
MFJ: Ooooh. You paused my heart. That’s the making of an essay, Vincent; one that I would read and read again. Cultural excavation, confined spaces, slow deaths. I already see the threads above weaving together so naturally. All of these so clearly scary and painful. The Smallness of Asking handles pain so deftly—both the physical pain as the eight-year-old protagonist gets cut when he falls into a gutter filled with mango pits and the emotional consequences suffered after stealing a tangerine. Does pain generally play a role in your writing?
VA: Like breathing, suffering is axiomatic to our existence. Memories of pain do cast their shadows on my stories, but typically if the pain is at a distance. Active agony—whether from heartache or therapy-proof depression or the jolt of a negative coming out experience—sucks air from the body and stifles its possibilities. In my experience, a numbed mind only wallows. When the spirits finally rise, wallowing becomes rumination. Questions arise. Tales follow, many germinated from seeds of light. I’ve written about a mother’s selfless love, a friend’s gentle haircut, a sister’s grace—all of these born from joyful memories.
MFJ: Anniversaries are a wonderful time to bring joyful memories to the forefront. In honor of Split Lip turning ten, can you share a memory from when you were age 10?
VA: In grade five, I entered a two-round national math contest. Top scorers from round one were invited to the nation’s capital for round two. When I qualified, my mom decided that we’d take a plane instead of the bumpy eight-hour bus from Enugu to Abuja. As in, we’d be all the way up there. With the birds. In a magic flying bus! The night before, my stomach bubbled. Sleep proved elusive. The seconds moved like hours, but in seemingly no time, my mom and I were seated side by side, watching a stretch of tarmac road race past and then sink beneath us. The topsy-turvy feeling of being unmoored from gravity turned my excitement into cold, concrete fear. I closed my eyes, clutched tightly onto my mom’s hand, refused to touch the in-flight snacks, and made various end-of-life promises to God. When we landed, I decided I’d never take a plane anywhere ever again, but I soon found myself missing the experience. It’s funny that intrigue and terror are often sides of the same coin.
MFJ: How impressive! I'm also an engineer, but I've never been flown anywhere to flaunt my math skills! Intrigue and terror do seem like quite the complimentary pairing indeed. Hopefully the terror stayed in the airplane and didn't affect the results of your math contest! And I'm guessing that those in-flight snacks were entirely miss-able, although to tell you a dirty little secret, I hoard tiny packages of in-flight snacks in my briefcase out of fear that I might miss a meal and they could save the day. Of course, those tiny snacks get churned into an inedible, ultra-fine flour when crunched by my laptop. I told you a secret, now you tell me one!
VA: It’s slightly embarrassing, but I think writers naturally accept a certain level of shamelessness. When I have tea and bread for breakfast, I often soak the bread in the tea until it’s all soggy before eating it. It’s something I used to mock my younger sister for in childhood (“you’re a bush girl!”). But I get it now. So, I’m sorry, Chioma. You were absolutely right. There, I said it.
MFJ: Sisters are always right! I tell my three brothers this all of the time, but they have never uttered your beautiful words above—"You were absolutely right." Oh, what a wonderful brother (and writer) you are, Vincent! Thanks for helping us celebrate our tenth birthday!
Michele Finn Johnson’s story collection, Development Times Vary, won the 2021 Moon City Short Fiction Award and is forthcoming from Moon City Press in 2022. Johnson’s prose has appeared in A Public Space online, Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, DIAGRAM, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her work was selected for the 2019 Best Small Fictions anthology, won an AWP Intro Journals Award in nonfiction, and has been nominated several times for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Microfiction. Michele lives in Tucson and serves as contributing editor at Split Lip Magazine. Find her online at michelefinnjohnson.com and on twitter at @m_finn_johnson.