a story to two or three magazines, get the nice rejection leter, and just give up on it. Aſter two decades of doing that I had a bulging file on my computer called “Oddities” and, in a general pandemic-inspired life-reassessment, I went into it and started rooting around and thought that some of the work had some hope.


The Emma Press had put out one of its regular calls for


pitches and, knowing Emma Dai’an Wright, its editor-in- chief, through my time [as editorial director] at [literary magazine] Wasafiri, I asked if she would be interested in looking at a pitch. I threw together what I thought were the best stories on my computer, expecting another nice rejection and she said, basically, surprisingly, “I like these but not these, what else have you got?” It was the first editorial conversation like that I’d ever had—hopeful. I then sent some alternatives and some more alternatives and ideas and, aſter maybe two months, we were working on a collection. One of the best suggestions she made from an early conversation, that quelled a lot of anxiet, was that the stories didn’t have to be thematically unified, that they only needed to harmonise with each other in the way songs might on a good mixtape. So I guess the biggest surprise was how well thinking of it like a collection of music worked for me. And then, in the final reshuffling of material, how the stories all, unintended by me, were at some level about storytelling—about the kinds of stories we tell to ourselves about ourselves and the stories we tell about other people to position and make sense of ourselves. It was a completely accidental theme. It’s a totally logical preoccupation of someone writing their first collection, but it really surprised me. I’m still not fully sure what to make of it.


Stop presenting Black writers as primarily valuable for their anthropological interest... Read our work and present us as artists, like our peers


Elements from fairytales permeate a number of the stories, for example we have döppelgangers in “Mirrors” and a ghastly arrival in “Limbs”. What is about fairytales that resonate with you? This is one of those things that I really wouldn’t have seen myself. I would go back again to being moved by stories with a clear moral imperative, I think. And perhaps stories that aren’t too hung up on realism. My favourite story is “The Emperor’s New Clothes”. It’s a perfect parable of the self-perception of those in power and how it’s enabled by those who pretend they don’t see what they see in order to advance their own interests. Once you have read it and understood it, it functions as a lens through which all sorts of actions in the world beyond the story can be read. I suppose I aspire to writing with that force; writing in a way that could change the way a reader sees the world.


You can’t move for multiverses these days, so if you were to send a story to yourself when you were editor at Wasa- firi, what advice would you give your


younger self about your writing? Lord, I think I would say, “Just keep writing”. As I get older I wish I could reach back to that younger self and say, ‘It’ll be alright. It worked out alright”, about so many things. A really concrete piece of advice is to stop editing.


To know when to stop. There’s a Toni Morrison Paris Review interview where she talks about worrying a piece of writing to death, and I did that all the time—revised and revised and revised the magic out of something, the way you can erase and redraw a pencil sketch into just wrinkled paper.


The title for your amazing collection is Parables, Fables, Nightmares. Parables and fables are genres that suggest a moral imperative; what morals are the tales imparting on the reader? An important final stage of writing fiction for me is always to ask, “So what am I saying here? What is this thing revealing to me about what I think about the world?” I’m not sure if everyone who writes asks that or if it’s an emanation from my day job [McIntosh is a lecturer of English at the Universit of Cambridge]. I’ve also been frustrated by what I feel is a kind of overarching nihilism in a wide range of contemporary narrative. I find the sum total of much writen in the last few years is something along the lines of, “Everyone is compromised. Everything is morally suspect. Shrug.” Which is something I just can’t follow. We have spoken of mutual adoration of John Gardner, who has a litle cameo in the book, and my favourite work of his is On Moral Fiction, which basically argues that all good fiction has a moral imperative and, further, ought to. I’m not sure if I agree with the last part, but I do feel that the books that have moved me most in life have had some animating interest in the good—what it might be to live well, even if only by portraying its absence.


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We are arguably in a boom of interest in Black British writers, but the thing about booms is they tend to bust. What do you think publishers and writers can do to make sure the boom is sustained? Stop presenting Black writers as primarily valuable for their anthropological interest, for what they can potentially teach readers about the perspective of the Other. Read our work and present us as artists, like our peers, hurled into the lives we’re in and using our writing to make sense of where we are and the world around us. It’s true that no small percentage of Black writers through history have writen works that focus on the experience of being minoritised, but through that they have tried to illuminate another aspect of what it’s like to live in their era. We write about being. We think about living. Value us for that.


Malachi McIntosh is the former editorial director of literary magazine Wasafiri. Parables, Fables, Nightmares is published by The Emma Press in September. Faber will be publishing his début novel in 2024. Morgan Omotoye is an author. His novelette Here is Where was published by Open Pen in 2021.


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