It’s time to take your seat at the table for the penultimate culinary conversation I’ll share from the 80th World Science Fiction Convention, following my chats there with Wesley Chu, Carol Tilley, Eileen Gunn, and Michael Swanwick. Now I invite you to join me at the table with the multi-award winning writer and editor Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki.

Ekpeki — who won the Best Novelette Nebula Award earlier this year for “O2 Arena” — was up for two Hugo Awards that weekend. Not only as a writer for “O2 Arena” again — but also in the category of Best Editor, Short Form. Plus earlier this month, he won a World Fantasy Award in the category of Best Anthology for The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction. He has also won the Otherwise, Nommo and British Fantasy Awards, plus has been a finalist for the Locus, British Science Fiction Association, Theodore Sturgeon Memorial, and This Is Horror awards.

His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in or are forthcoming in Tordotcom, Apex Magazine, Strange Horizons, Asimov’s, Galaxy’s Edge, Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores, and more. In addition to editing that first ever — and now award-winning — Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction anthology, he also co-edited the award-winning Dominion: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction From Africa and the African Diaspora, as well as — most recently — the Africa Risen anthology from Tordotcom, co-edited with Sheree Renée Thomas and Zelda Knight.

We discussed the reason “shocked” seemed an inadequate word to describe his feelings about winning a Nebula Award earlier this year, what he considered the true prize he won over his Worldcon weekend, how growing up next to a library changed his life, how writing fan fiction helped him get where he is today, the way reading the struggles of a certain character in a Patrick Rothfuss novel helped him deal with his own struggles, what caused him to say “the law cannot help you change the law,” when he decided his novella “Ife-Iyoku, Tale of Imadeyunuagbon” deserved to be a trilogy, the way he does his best work when backed into a corner, how it’s possible for three editors to edit an anthology, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us — (more…)

Getting hired to work on staff at mid-’70s Marvel Comics was a dream come true. And having the chance to write comics both for them, and after I went freelance, for DC Comics as well, and being able to play with such characters as Captain Marvel, Supergirl, Spider-Man, The Vision, and others was a joy.

So why, when I applied to the Clarion Science Fiction Writing Workshop in 1979, did I beg them to let me in so I could turn my back on comics?

Over the years, I’ve offered up two reasons —

The first is that during my years in the field, my fiction output dwindled severely. Before turning from comics fan to comics pro, I was writing short stories endlessly. Sometimes one a week. Sometimes even more frequently than that, because in an essay for one of the Clarion anthologies, Harlan Ellison explained (or perhaps someone else told of his week teaching there) how he asked students to write a story a day during his stint. I can’t remember the purpose of such an exercise, but whatever its reason, I lasted three days.

But those stories continued to pour out of me … until I went to work in comics. It’s a difficult thing to bring yourself to work on a story which might take years to sell, when every word I could write in comics and hand in one week — from letter columns to splash pages for the British reprint books to ad copy — would earn me a check the following week. Sometimes that payment only took days. Which is why when I encountered the following George Bernard Shaw quote, it resonated mightily: “If you want to be a writer, you must have money, otherwise people will throw money at your head to buy your talent to use it and distort it for their own frivolous purpose.” I knew that if I didn’t wean myself from the comics income, I might never return to working on my fiction in earnest.

More importantly, though, I found my time in comics was damaging my actual ability to write the fiction I wanted. My time at Marvel was spent aping Stan Lee. So facile was I at that task I even wrote the Bullpen Bulletins copy for a while. (Don’t worry — Stan always wrote those Soapboxes himself.) But what I found was that because I was young and immature — I started on staff at Marvel at only 19 — I was unable to maintain a wall between the style of writing I did for myself and the one I used for comics. My short stories were beginning to sound like Stan, filled with bombast and alliteration. I realized that if I didn’t leave comics, I might never find my own voice.

So I broke away, working a series of non-creative jobs which protected that part of myself. It wasn’t until the early ’90s that I’d matured enough to allow myself a creative staff job — creating and editing Science Fiction Age magazine — knowing I no longer had to fear the loss of my voice.

My journey into and then out of the comics industry is much more complicated than that, with many twists and turns, and when asked how I could walk away from such a magical field, I’ve often expounded on all of the above in greater detail. But just the other day, I stumbled across a poem by Robert Graves titled “Epitaph on an Unfortunate Artist” which explains my quandary far more succinctly than I ever could —

He found a formula for drawing comic rabbits:
The formula for drawing comic rabbits paid.
So in the end he could not change the tragic habits
This formula for drawing comic rabbits made.

I consider myself lucky to have gotten away in time, before those tragic habits became unchangeable.