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Describe your latest book.
Hangman tells the story of a middle-aged exile who is returned to his home country after twenty-six years of living in America. The circumstances of his return are unclear, though he senses he may be there because his brother is sick, or perhaps his brother is dead already. The book follows him over the course of four days as he journeys to his hometown. Along the way, he is propelled by interactions with strangers who he confuses for family, and family who he confuses for strangers. There’s an absurdist quality to a lot of those interactions, and the narrator’s tone moves between slapstick and melancholy, until eventually it slips into something like horror.

What was your favorite book as a child?
I loved the D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths. I don’t remember if I encountered it only at school, or if I also had a copy at home, but I know I read it semi-obsessively and was haunted by the story of Persephone and Demeter, especially — though I never remembered that Persephone wound up staying with her captor-lover, Hades, and away from her mother. I also loved being read stories about Anansi, the trickster spider.

When did you know you were a writer?
In the first grade, we were meant to write and produce a book from printer paper and string. I was already writing stories at home but knew that what the teacher expected was something simple; she was a great teacher, but didn’t have high hopes for her students, who after all had basically just learned the alphabet. I handed in a book I called “The Color Book.” The conceit was obvious, each page an uncontroversial declaration: “The sky is blue,” “The ground is brown,” etc.

I felt proud of myself, and proud for pulling one over on my teacher, who praised me the same way she praised all the other children. But my mother was furious; she knew I had tried to pass myself off as stupider than I was. I wasn’t ashamed, even when she made her shame clear. I realized that writing was something that could produce feelings, and that maybe my ability to produce negative feelings in my mother meant that I had a special skill. But I was completely uninterested in writing as a profession; having a profession sounded like the most boring possible thing that could happen to me.

What does your writing workspace look like?
Lately, I’ve been working between two desks. One is tucked away in a dark corner of my bedroom and faces the wall; it’s not pleasant to be there, and the lack of pleasantness sometimes wills me to focus. The other desk is in my living room, between two big windows. Above it is a framed poster of the Amharic alphabet that I stole from my father — I’m always forgetting how to read, and I know I’ve gotten really bad when I begin to look at the poster as something abstract. I try to keep the focus desk bare, though it does house a defunct desktop computer. The window desk is less punishing. On it I have dried flowers, whatever books I’m reading, a family photo, and an accumulating assortment of drink glasses that I really need to wash.

What do you care about more than most people around you?
I’m very superstitious, but my superstition has no internal logic, and so I often wind up finding significance in things that are objectively random. I probably place more emphasis than most on intuition, even if that intuition is inexplicable, and I try to heed it. I also make a lot of wishes, using all the conventional things — eyelashes, dandelions — and also unconventional ones; sometimes even garbage feels ominous.
Besides your personal library, do you have any beloved collections?
I don’t have any intentional collections, but I have a very hard time getting rid of plane tickets. The experience of flying is still not natural to me. Often it is frightening, humiliating, anxiety-inducing, etc., but the whole process feels sacred and unbelievable, and it always seems wrong to discard the paraphernalia that attend it. So, I have little ticket stubs in my jacket pockets, at the bottom of my bags, and tucked between the pages of my books. Now that I’m writing this, though, I’m realizing that my boarding passes are increasingly just digital artifacts stored on my phone. Which I don’t like!

What's the strangest or most interesting job you've ever had?
For a very brief period, I was hired to ghostwrite a book for a very famous magician. He had a subterranean lair in New York where I would go after my full-time job in publishing to interview him, or else to read to him from Don Quixote, which he loved. I could never tell how big the space was, or if he lived there, but in my mind, it stretched seven stories underground. At the same time, I was tutoring a ninth grader whose parents were very wealthy, and whose brownstone was six stories high. I was always walking up and down stairs then, until I left both jobs — the ghostwriting gig because the magician was accused of rape, and the tutoring gig because I was fired after telling my tutee that Benjamin Franklin invented the lightbulb.

What scares you the most as a writer?
I am very, very afraid of forgetting things. Forgetfulness makes my writing very difficult. Writing, even “impersonal” writing, can help curb forgetfulness, but it also only seems possible when I feel proximate to everything I’ve gone through. A lot of things in my life distract me from that feeling of immediacy, the internet chief among them. I think the internet does bad things to my writing brain, and I fear becoming more reliant on it.

Offer a favorite sentence or passage from another writer.
I think often of this passage from Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, in which she describes what the poet Jean Toomer saw when he walked the American south — women who were artists, but whom he mis-identified as saints:

"When the poet Jean Toomer walked through the South in the early ’20s, he discovered a curious thing: Black women whose spirituality was so intense, so deep, so unconscious, that they were themselves unaware of the richness they held. They stumbled blindly through their lives: creatures so abused and mutilated in body, so dimmed and confused by pain, that they considered themselves unworthy even of hope.

In the selfless abstractions their bodies became to the men who used them, they became more than “sexual objects,” more even than mere women: They became Saints. Instead of being perceived as whole persons, their bodies became shrines: What was thought to be their minds became temples suitable for worship. These crazy “Saints” stared out at the world, wildly, like lunatics — or quietly, like suicides; and the “God” that was in their gaze was as mute as a great stone."

What's your biggest grammatical pet peeve?
Inventive grammar, technically incorrect grammar, is my favorite grammar — when people treat language malleably, they’re often thinking much more critically about what it means, how it works. Most of my family speaks English as a second language, and their idiosyncratic grammar is where I feel at home. My father, for example, will sometimes end his sentences in contractions, especially when he’s making demands of me, e.g. “Please let me know how you’re.”

Do you have any phobias?
I wouldn’t describe my fear as phobic, because to me it seems highly rational, but I’m very afraid of the ocean. I didn’t used to be. I used to believe that the ocean had my best interests at heart. But then I got caught in a riptide and almost drowned, and I realized how indifferent the water is to human life. So now I regard it with respect and trepidation.

What's the best advice you’ve ever received?
I tend to think that the best advice finds you at the right moment; the same advice, encountered some other time, might be completely unhelpful or else actively bad. I had a college professor who suggested I write only short sentences — at the time, it was transformative, and my sentences still tend to be quite short, but if I now followed that advice completely, my writing would be very flat.

A friend recently sent me a quote from Martha Graham, about how an artist should encounter their work, and I’ve found it to be very helpful during this period of my life: “It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you.”

These are the books I’ve made a point of rereading throughout my life, anytime I’ve felt their memory grow distant.

Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Saleh
The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Letters from London by C. L. R. James
Eva’s Man by Gayl Jones

Maya Binyam is a fiction writer and critic whose work has appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, New York, Bookforum, Columbia Journalism Review, The New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. She is a contributing editor at The Paris Review and has previously worked as an editor at Triple Canopy and The New Inquiry. She lives in Los Angeles. Hangman is her debut novel.