The Beauty Still Remains: An Interview with Ra’Niqua Lee

• Hi Ra’Niqua. It’s a time for you. Your first collection, flash fiction, For What Ails You, comes out from ELJ Press on November 6, and not too much after, there’s the matter of the twins you are carrying coming out. Congratulations on all of it. Besides being exhausted, how are you feeling? Share some emotions. Brag!

I am in a really complex transitional phase right now. I’m transitioning into being a mother of two, having my first book out, and finally finishing school. In May, I graduated with a Ph.D. in English, specifically African American literature, with a focus on Black queer feminist studies. This has so far been the best and most exciting time of my life. Does that count as bragging?

For What Ails You started out as a chapbook—I made the goal in late 2021 to get a short collection published. I came up with ten flash ideas and drafted them within a few months. When Ariana at ELJ Editions wrote back to accept the chapbook, I was asked to expand it into a full collection. I happily agreed with the caveat that I wanted to experiment with genre. I had no idea what would come from it. It took me three to four months to write the remainder of the collection, and I sat on it for several more months, submitting individual pieces here and there. The most beautiful thing to me about the collection is that it is representative of a time in my life when I had the freedom to spend as much time as I needed pounding out stories that came to me when life felt a bit more still. Hoping for more of that time in the future.

• Let’s talk about the collection. ELJ describes it as being about Black femmes who “battle a multiverse of woes, racism, and generational trauma.” Can you tell us what that looks like in your writing?

I came up with that tagline after I had drafted most of the collection. It was a way for me to reconcile my vision with the thirty or so somewhat disparate stories. Unfortunately, “multiverse” was and remained mostly aspirational. When I say multiverse, I’m thinking of Marvel or DC. Time travel. Doctor Who. I had a time trying to connect that concept to the grounded way I tend to tell stories. There are characters in the book who reappear, under different names, under different circumstances. So perhaps the book itself is the multiverse?

The racism and generational trauma hopefully make perfect sense by the end of the collection. For What Ails You mostly focuses on intercommunal concerns—family and friendships, and friendships that are or become family. I tried to show that even inside communities that folks might stereotype as homogenous, there are differences and cleavages—age, gender, class, geography, aspirations, etc. “What Comes Out in the Wash” has the main character address her own internalized racism at the death of her father. Two of my favorite pieces, “Glitters is Gold” and “From the Olive Tree,” depict families who come together, each member with their own successes, failures, prejudices, and so on.

• On your website, you self-identify as a “hood feminist.” What does that mean to you? How does it inform your stories and characters?

First, shout out to Mikka Kendall for writing the book that introduced me to the phrase. Hood feminism is very aligned with Black feminism, in that it attempts to center the needs of the most marginalized folks in our communities. For those of us who want to make the world better, we look to the people with the least, both in our communities and globally, to show us how.

“Hood,” shortened from neighborhood, adjacent to the word ghetto. It’s a word that has meant a lot of things. It has class connotations, and specifically in the US, it has racial connotations as well. Some folks use it as a dehumanizing term. I’ve told people I’m from the hood and have been subsequently asked if I support murderers and thieves. Stereotypes. As if there aren’t thieves and murderers everywhere.

For What Ails You is my attempt to celebrate hood folks. Some of the most creative people I’ve ever met have come from some of the worst neighborhoods. I was born in Atlanta in the early nineties. The city was very different back then. I saw things before the age of six that no child should, but there was also beauty there. And as far as I’m concerned, the beauty still remains.

• The first story I read of yours was “Saviors, Spells, and American Tragedies” (an award-winning story published by The Lumiere Review).

It’s one I’ve never forgotten. With a title like that, it sounds like an epic novel, yet it’s only 1100 words. In that short space, you manage to invoke the Middle Passage, Revolutionary and Civil wars, the brutality of slavery, witches, polytheism, and create complex characters all within the setting of one of our contemporary blood-soaked battle sites, the football field. How did you craft this story? How were you able to layer it so? Have you thought about expanding it into a novel?

That story wouldn’t exist without my writing group, all GSU creative writing grads. We put together a few flash fiction workshops, and “Saviors, Spells, and American Tragedies” was a response to a fan fiction prompt. I settled on a character and a setting, and the tone/voice just came to me. Sometimes it happens like that—most times not. I got lucky that people vibed with it as much as I did. The inspiration for the story was to have fun and speak back to an author who had created a whole world with only the parts of history that were convenient. I just wanted to widen the lens a bit. The layering I might attribute to my academic interests. The classes I took on post-colonialism and global blackness have actually helped a lot with my fiction.

• Lightning Round 1: Who are your literary inspirations, present and past?

Toni Morrison, first and foremost. She was a force, and in my eyes, she was the best US writer we’ve had. A close second is Zora Neale Hurston; she was a writer and an ethnographer. Her writing cherished common forms of blackness in a way that was disregarded during her life. She didn’t really get the recognition she deserved until Alice Walker rediscovered Their Eyes Were Watching God decades later. Despite that, Hurston continued to chase the stories she loved, and there is a lot of information we might not have access to today if she had just done what was popular and celebrated.

In the present, I love my southern Black writers. The known folks like Jesmyn Ward and the folks who are becoming known like Exodus Brownlow and Hugh Hunter. They inspire me to keep telling the stories that matter to me.

• Lightning Round 2: What books do you want your twins to read? First as children, then as young adults.

One of the first books, the twins have received is A is for Activist. It’s so cute, but it highlights a lot of “big” political words that many people are afraid to say. Whether my love bugs agree or disagree with my outlook on life as they grow, I never want them to be afraid to talk about it.

I have a big collection of books—although my collection is smaller than it used to be; moving around a lot with books is too much. I’d love for them to grow up going through my bookshelves the same way I went through my mother’s shelves when I was a younger. I had to hide while reading her books, but I’ve got a lot less erotica than she did. She still doesn’t know that one of the first books of hers I read was The Coldest Winter Ever by Sistah Souljah. Not for kids.

• A second story I want to discuss is one you sent to our press (Roi Fainéant), “Exchange Rates for City Babies and Border Girls.” You open that story with the brilliant line: “Spring break meant a trip south of Atlanta to Georgia’s fat bottom.” I love this personification of Georgia. Give us the genesis of this line. I know your writing is deeply embedded in the South, and readers will need to read your collection, but can you give us some sense of your feelings toward Georgia and the South as a whole?

Based on the geographical borders of the state, Georgia has a fat ass. The top looks something like a military haircut. Then it balloons out toward the Florida border. That line was inspired by the time when my grandfather and step-grandmother moved to Thomaston. It’s a tiny rural town, which is honestly not that close to Florida, but that’s the fun of writing fiction. In my stories, I twist, cut, and break Georgia into shapes that work for me. In general, I became interested in writing about the South when I realized I didn’t have to let other people’s perceptions shape my own. I realized that the South I wrote, my South, didn’t have to be representative of anything but my own experiences. The catalyst for this realization was Ciara’s music video for “Oh.” That was 2004. The lyrics:

“This is where they stay crunk, throw it up
Dubs on the Cadillac, White tees, Nikes
Gangstas don’t know how to act
Adamsville, Bankhead, College Park, Carver Homes
Hummers floatin’ on chrome, chokin’ on that home-grown”

It was a version of the South I could recognize. I hope this collection makes Atlanta folks feel the way this song made me feel.

• As a Black feminist, intellectual, and writer, what do you make of these times? An amazing Black female writer, Deesha Philyaw, just got a seven-figure book deal, yet at the same time, books are being burned, and the Florida curriculum calls for discussing the positive skill-building aspects of slavery. Two steps forward, one step back, or the reverse? Who gets to tell the American story, if it even exists?

I like that the question of the American story ends with that caveat, “if it even exists.” There are millions of American stories. They all get told if you listen. My thoughts on this are probably controversial. I love to see folks succeed, especially Black femmes. I’m here for it all! However, individual victories are never going to undo the structural conditions that allow someone like Desantis to become governor and enact the full range of his bigotry. Florida doesn’t happen in cultural and political isolation, but often our victories do.

• What’s the hardest part of writing a short story for you?

The hardest part is following the story-telling rules. Making sure it has a plot with compelling beats, making sure the main character has an arc. As much as I love breaking rules, some of them really do make a difference. Even in flash fiction, there has got to be a beginning, middle, and end. I try my best to stretch what that means, though. In “Navigation for Mythical Beings,” a character rolls up on a mermaid in the middle of the night and drives off with her. The beginning is the character spotting the mermaid. The middle is the character contemplating what to do. The end is them driving off together. That’s not so much of a story arc, but for the life of me, that seems to be the only movement the story would allow. And I love it!

• Any advice for younger writers?

My advice for younger writers is to write what you see and what you want to see. My favorite part of teaching workshops, and especially workshops geared toward younger folks, is getting to see the students’ perspectives. They’re so creative and so aware. Step into the classroom with middle schoolers. They have stories to TELL, and I live for it.

• Any future projects you’d care to share with us?

I hope to make strides to get my novel published. The book, Frenzied, Desperate Birds, was my master’s thesis. It has been revised/rewritten too many times. The first few pages won third prize in the Craft Literary first chapter’s contest last year. I’ve submitted it to a couple of presses, but I plan to seek representation for it next year. I’m hoping I can place it because I feel trapped in a way. Like this baby has to go out before I can focus on writing another book. Wish me luck.

• Anything else I should have asked you?

What are your hopes for the life of the book?

I just hope someone reads it and loves it. I read it, and I love it, so my hopes have been fulfilled! Honestly, I don’t like to think about the reach of my work. It gets in the way of me being happy with what I’ve accomplished, and this book feels like a triumph for me. It was a dream in my heart, and I made it a reality. That’s the best thing.

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Ra’Niqua Lee writes to share her particular visions of love and the South. She earned an MFA in fiction from Georgia State University in 2018, and she is currently at Emory pursuing a Ph.D. in early African American literature with a focus on spatial and Black queer feminist theories. She is the managing editor for Southern Spaces and Atlanta Studies and an assistant fiction editor for Split Lip Magazine. Her work has been anthologized in Best of the Net and Best Small Fictions 2023. You can find her at http://muddahlee.com.

Francois Bereaud is a husband, dad, full time math professor, mentor in the San Diego Congolese refugee community, and mediocre hockey player. His stories and essays have been published online and in print and have earned Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations. He serves as an editor at Roi Fainéant Press and Porcupine Literary. The Counter Pharma-Terrorist & The Rebound Queen is his published chapbook. In 2024, Cowboy Jamboree Press will publish his first full manuscript, San Diego Stories, which is the realization of a dream Links to his writing at francoisbereaud.com.