OluTimehin Kukoyi

At the time when Feria’s Story came to me, I was thinking a lot about decorative flowers and my budding enjoyment of frivolous, beautiful things. I used to tell myself I didn’t like flowers because they’re so expensive and then they just die, you know? Anyway, I was lying. I really love flowers. I hope I succeed in growing a garden of my own one day.

In addition to flowers, I was thinking about family, childhood trauma and loss, which are other things I have quite complex relationships to. In all honesty, a lot of Feria’s Story closely mirrors my own. I suppose writing the piece was a way of dreaming up certain kinds of sweetness I never got to experience, like an easy first love. If my grief could be her grief, then it follows that her joy could be my joy too. Right?

Perhaps this is a literary cliché, but Feria developed herself. I already had the bones of the story before the Feel Good project came along; one night, I was sitting at my desk and Feria’s name, grandmother and orchid-filled childhood home started to appear on my laptop screen. It surprised me quite a bit because I don’t even consider myself a fiction writer, but I was in an exploratory space at the time—I still am. I suppose that in my openness to new things, Feria saw a chance to come into the world and took it.

In the beginning, the story was more about Feria’s family and her experiences as a child growing up in the shadow of a failed parental relationship. But then it veered away from her home life towards this traumatic incident that she witnessed, and then it just got stranger from there. The Feel Good project gave me a useful frame for where the story could go though, and it turned out Feria liked it. It felt like a successful negotiation in the end.

Still, Feria’s trajectory as a character felt really choppy to me because even now, her actual nature eludes me. I feel like I don’t know her well. She seems like a lovely person who’s afraid of the world, which made editing a bit difficult. I couldn’t pin her down enough to make the story as smooth as I would’ve liked. But the story had a mind of its own. Feria had a mind of her own. I just did my best to create room for her to show up the way she wanted to, and subsequently to edit until she felt a bit more coherent to me (and hopefully to readers).

Oh, this is easy. The moment where Feria sees her person for the first time, and allows herself—is able to allow herself—to experience what that means. I love that moment so very much. It feels like the stuff of every dream I’ve ever had for my teenage self, who fell in all kinds of love and never knew it because she didn’t have any clue whatsoever about falling in love like that. That moment presented itself to me just like much of the story did, and I loved it from its first shadowy form until its final edit.

Editing the story was hard because the main character felt so elusive. It’s been over a year and she still feels elusive! I have small chunks of her life and nothing for the rest of it. And because so much of the story just presented itself to me, ‘making stuff up’ to fill in the empty spots didn’t quite work.

There were some parts where I was able to add details that fleshed things out a bit, but most of the story didn’t let me do that. It felt like working within very strict, even if friendly, constraints. I thought having more time with the story might change that, but it just wasn’t happening. And I don’t believe in forcing things, so I decided that readers would make of the story what they will. I do hope they like it though.

I hope readers see that nothing is the end, unless you stop living. So many queer people—so many people, period—experience all kinds of devastation. It makes it hard to keep living or to stay open. But as long as you stay open, more light can come in. More life can come in. Nothing is the end unless you allow it to be. Not even death, but that’s a whole other story—and I mean that quite literally. A story about death not being the end is coming too. It’s just that if Feria is an elusive character, Death is exponentially more so. And writing fiction is quite new territory for me.

So I hope readers take Feria and her openness despite everything with them. And I hope she makes them want to come back and see who else wants to enter the storybooks through me. That’s all, I think.

Yours,

A.