Welcome back, Victor! We’re so pleased to be able to bring your beautiful story “Parebul of the Mother, Asked in Moonlight” to our readers. Can you tell us how this story came to be?

The earliest scenes came to my mind one evening as I sat with a friend whose experiences parallel my main character’s. She was asking her son Parebul; and I thought, “What if she needs to do this to find herself a home? To play the games from our childhood to get something so profound . . . ” I had a skeletal vision of the landlady that demanded a game of balans-bɔl. The piece grew from there, a merge of imagination and reality. I am forever grateful to that friend for giving me this story.

Themes of contrast run through your work: desperation and pride, need and generosity, violence and love. Are those calculated choices that you make during the creative process, or do they emerge from the subject matter?

The themes were inherent to the story’s real-life inspiration, so they emerged naturally as I wrote. They weren’t merely themes—but the day to day hurts and hopes of a mother in search of safety.

We had the pleasure of publishing your piece “rat/god” in the June issue. One thing that strikes me about your work is that the line between prose and poetry is very fluid. Where is that line, in your mind? Or is there one?

There is no line, in my mind. I started my writing journey with poems. I think mostly in poetry when creating, though I believe different stories crave different styles and structures. My favourite things to read, or be inspired by, use a perfect blend of prose and poetic techniques. And I try my best to listen to the story I am working on, its different parts, and do whatever they demand of me.

In the end the landlord says, “I believe our stories should give us homes.” Your home of Freetown in Sierra Leone feels like a character itself in this story. How would you describe the relationship between your stories and your home?

I have noticed over the years that the relationship between my stories and my home is cyclical. My experience of home, the good, the bad, inspires my stories, and my stories, in turn, have inspired my experience of home.

Sierra Leone is a magical country. Freetown, a magical city, trauma aside, broken-dreams aside, on and on. Passers-by have rich stories if you know where and how to look. Streets and markets, hills and beaches, music, art, clubs, every sunset, every full moon, rain, harmattan. My stories are teaching me how to see, and how to listen.

What are you working on now, and what can our readers look forward to seeing from you in the future?

I am working on short stories, mostly flash fiction. A friend and I are doing our second year of a flash a day challenge the entire month of November. BTW “rat/god” was written during last year’s challenge. I am working on these pieces, sharpening them to send into the world.

Works readers can look forward to: I have flash fiction forthcoming in issues of both Lightspeed Magazine and Tales to Terrify, as well as a poem coming in Strange Horizons, all written in last year’s flash challenge. I also have a short story out soon on PodCastle. I hope readers enjoy them as much as I did imagining and writing them.