THE SHORT

I grew up in Zimbabwe and later, South Africa. My first novel, House of Stone, is about history. My second novel, Digging Stars, is about astronomy. I have taught graduate fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and currently teach fiction at Emerson College. One of my pleasures is not knowing what I am going to write about next. I go wherever curiosity leads me.

THE LONG

I grew up in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. My family wanted me to be a doctor or an engineer, but I couldn’t see myself in this. After high school, I studied Architecture for a semester; my family thought this could marry my love for the arts with my talent for science. But I dropped out after a few months; I would wake up in the mornings, bid my family goodbye, pretend to go to class, and spend my days in the city writing. I do not know why I did this. I think it was an illogical thing to do. But I lived with this arbitrary, terrible dread (I don’t know where it came from; perhaps it was an accumulation of many things, including living in Zimbabwe during those tumultuous social years); a constant, muted humming frequency just beneath the surface of the everyday. Anyway. I was eventually found out and went back to university. This time, I studied Economics. By then, we were living in South Africa. I was shocked and pained by the life I saw Zimbabweans living there. My family had had hopes for a better life, and though the economy was better, South Africa was unwelcoming to foreigners. I became very anxious about being Zimbabwean in such a hostile environment. Writing was my way of trying to make sense of this. These reflections eventually turned into Shadows, my novella and short story collection.

I was admitted into the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and moved to the USA in 2013. My burning questions about Zimbabwe had led me down the rabbit hole of history. Unraveling the history of my home country was very painful, but ultimately freeing and illuminating. I looked at my mother and understood, for the first time, that she had endured apartheid in Rhodesia, then lived through a civil war, and then a genocide right after Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980. Now, in late middle age, here she was living through a dictatorship. I gazed at this woman who was my mother and saw her as a miracle. If there is one gift writing House of Stone gave me, it is this.

I stumbled into astronomy quite by accident. I was experiencing a crisis in my life about how to live and how to be in the world. I became curious about the stars since we evolved from them. This set me off on an enchanting journey. I found myself flying high in the Indigenous skies of North America and, eventually, dreaming about the Southern African night skies of my childhood. Just as when we look up at the stars we are looking back in time, to peer into astronomy is to peer into the portals of our fraught human history. Unraveling this filled me with both transcendence and grief, and I wrote a novel, Digging Stars.

MORE

I grew up in a house filled with books. I was the kind of child who always had a book in hand. After my father died—he lived in Rome—boxes and boxes of his books arrived at our house in Zimbabwe. There, you would find Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon alongside Kwame Appiah’s In My Father’s House. There were countless books of fiction, philosophy, history, anthropology…you name it. In my teens, I would read these books as a way to commune with my father. I believed I could learn more about him and who he had been through reading his books. This meant I spent hours squinting at incredibly boring, headache-inducing tomes I couldn’t make head or tail of. But a pattern began to emerge; if something captured my imagination, be it a work of fiction or philosophy or history, I would gobble it up. I have carried these reading habits into adulthood, and have discovered, joyfully, that they have seeped into my writing, too. Stories are one of the most powerful technologies we have—they usher us into deeper communion with one another and the world around us.