An Interview with P. Djèlí Clark

Interview Conducted by Evelyn Griffith

Evelyn: My first question is centered around writing process. How would you say that your process starts?

Djèlí: My process tends to start with an idea that I think is viable. I think ever since I was a kid, I’ve been a serial daydreamer, and so there are always ideas. Even walking here, I was like, “oh, what if a dragon came flying through? How would it figure out the buildings? Would it be able to weave between them? What would people think?” But, you know, most of those ideas that pop up are just thoughts. It’s when you land on something that makes me think “this is workable,” that will stay with me for a while. Sometimes I don’t even know it’s a writing thing. I just think it’s a daydream. I’m looking for something that makes me think, “oh, man, I think that’s a story,” and then it has to sit with me for a long time before I ever do anything about it. So, most of these ideas I have just fly away. If I start writing, if I start getting into my note section on my phone and I start writing down notes, it means the idea’s getting there, and then that sits with me. And I think they’ve always sat with me for a long time. Unless I’m given a directive, someone saying “I need you to write this,” and I’ve got to write it like within, a few days or something.

Evelyn: Does that happen often?

Djèlí:  Only if I get an anthology request or something like that; if it’s last minute because they’re trying to find something quickly. But most times stories arise organically, and they sit with me. It could be weeks, months, sometimes years, before I can actually write the story. And then it’s a matter of, if it’s a short story, just using my notes. If it’s anything longer, I’ll start doing outlines.

Evelyn: Do you ever get sentences or phrases that inspire the story?

Djèlí: Once in a while. I tend to get more scenes than sentences. I think I tend to see it in scenes, but occasionally I might have a line or dialogue where I want somebody to say some exact thing.

Evelyn: I want to talk about Abeni’s Song. So what was the inspiration for this?

Djèlí: It was me reading Earthsea [by Ursula K. Leguin] when I was younger; Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time series and all those things. It was based a lot on Spirited Away. It was me thinking about the old childhood movies that I liked such as The Never Ending Story, and The Dark Crystal and those things. And I knew I wanted to write a type of story in this setting because I hadn’t seen at the time that many stories in this setting [referring to both West Africa and the Middle Grade age group Abeni’s Song is written for]. Now I think it’s kind of blown up, but I actually, I should reveal this: I actually wrote an Abeni’s Song earlier than anything else I’ve written.

Evelyn: Oh, really?

Djèlí: It was written before Master of Djinn, before Ring Shout. It is the story. I think I started writing this story in the early to mid 2000s. In fact, I remember going to Costa Rica and I’m in the middle of writing, and that was in 2007. So it was there, and actually my agent told me to hold on to it. He said “let’s do other things before we launch this.” And so, it was after Ring Shout, after Master of Djinn when he said, “Hey, you still have that middle grade novel, right? You still want to take it out?”

Evelyn: That was probably hard to sit on, right?

Djèlí: Yeah. Because, you know, you revised it back then but now you’re like, oh, I wrote this six, seven years ago, 10 years ago, in that case. What do I think now?

Evelyn: But I’m sure that was kind of cool, though, to see something that you wrote so long ago and then to be able to edit it with fresh eyes?

Djèlí: Right. It was cool to go back and edit with a fresh perspective. And the fact that it hit with so many people who wanted it and ended up having a bidding war over it was exciting. And I was also really inspired by stories about child soldiers. That was a big issue at that time. Lupe Fiasco even had a song called “Little Weapon” that I used to listen to a lot when I was thinking about that. And so it’s interesting that my story came out, you know, 10 years or so later. Not a full 10, but at least eight or so years later. But some of the politics that I was talking about were wrapped up in that moment. The issue around child soldiers is like a big thing. And so I put it in there. I don’t think that ever goes away, but it at least it was being discussed a lot in the popular media.

Evelyn: Something I really liked about the story was that the plot felt very organic. It felt like they were dealing with these really hard problems as a child soldier might; going through in a logical, step-by-step way that made me wonder how I would react if I were a kid going through these things. What would I do?

Djèlí: Yeah, for example, when she first realizes she’s at the witch’s house, she would want to run off, right? It makes total sense. The “I’m not staying here. I want to go back home,” reaction. And sometimes you read children’s books and something like this happens and then the character responds with “I guess I’m just here.” And I was like, no, that’s not Abeni’s reaction. It doesn’t matter that she saw everything happen, because she didn’t have closure. I needed to have her behave how anyone would in completely changed circumstances, after seeing a traumatic event. She’s not going to just trust this new person [Asha]. She’s going to have a lot of distrust. And that’s a big part of it, right? Grown-ups lie and everything else. She’s dealing with the trauma of what she’s seen and she has to go through that before she can kind of settle in to her new life.

Evelyn: What inspired you to make Asha’s character turn back into a child again?

Djèlí: I knew that was going to happen from the beginning, when I first started thinking about Abeni’s Song. That was a big part of it. I don’t know why I liked the idea so much. Maybe I saw too many Yodas dying, or something, but I liked the idea of this person who’s not really a human, not a mortal, so why should they have to follow human rules? And I just thought it was such an interesting twist that Abeni goes from wanting to grow up faster while she’s with her family (everybody that age wants to be going up faster) to the loss of her family, and then finally she ends up being in this situation where this old witch is taking care of her. And I just thought, what a flip for that older character now to become the child. Abeni has this idea that she wants to grow up, right? And so now she is, and she says at one point, “who takes care of me?”

Evelyn: And she’s also the youngest kid in her family too. Right?

Djèlí: Yeah. But here that’s the irony of remembering that she’s 12, and she wanted to be older. She wanted to be an adult, but the irony is that no, she actually still wants to be a kid at the end of the day when something happens. She wants someone there to remind her when she asks “I’m still a kid, right?” And so I thought it was interesting to put her in a position of being a caretaker.

Evelyn: I liked that you didn’t tiptoe around the fact that she wasn’t meant to be the caretaker that way. She was meant to have many years with the older version of Asha before she took over that role.

Djèlí: So it was like those best laid plans, you know, but that’s what talking about making the story sticky means? What makes it sticky is that. I wanted people to get comfortable like, “oh, this is what’s supposed to happen.” And eventually  it seems like she’s falling in and she’s learning and she meets Obi the strong. Everybody loves Obi.

Evelyn: Oh, I love Obi.

Djèlí: Everybody does. But because of that it seems like she’s falling into this new rhythm. And I’m like, well, that’s the exact point at which I as a storyteller have to get you out of that comfort zone, right? It’s not comfortable. Just when you think she’s hit her stride, here comes this new thing to disrupt.

Evelyn: Yeah, and I liked the way that the passage of time worked in the book, because we spend a whole year with the older version of Asha, but it goes so quickly and then the rest of the story takes place after that. That was her training montage.

Djèlí: I’ll tell you what, that was—and I’m glad you said it like that—because it was hard, at times, to convince a lot of people that it was worth including.

Evelyn: Really?

Djèlí: It was hard to convince my agent and my editor. I had to convince them it should be there, because they were worried about it being too slow for a middle grade audience. They wanted to start the action right away, and I think it’s funny you used the words “training montage.” I think if I had set that story at a school, things like that are almost allowed. Like if they were going to assassin school or something it would be allowed, because there’s this “period of training” that’s already expected. But because there wasn’t a school in Abeni’s case, they kept asking if I was “sure I wanted to include it?” And every time I said, “I do.” Even her time in the village was cut down more and more and, in some cases, I’m glad it was cut, but I knew that I couldn’t erase her being in the village because I needed to make people see what she’s fighting for.

Evelyn: That, but also if you didn’t have that, I feel like the song itself wouldn’t have been so meaningful.

Djèlí: Right. Without the village, the song is not as meaningful. Her connections to Fomi, and Ekwolo and all that. And because each of these characters is brought back, you need to see where they came from and what’s changed. I wanted to invert the whole thing because I love playing with tropes and then subverting them. For example, Sowoke is the mean girl, right at the beginning. But I wanted to show how in the end, she and Fomi have been through things and she’s no longer a flat character: you can’t say she’s that same person anymore, and their whole dynamic with Abeni has changed. It’s separated Abeni from her old friends because she’s gone through one thing and they’ve gone through another.

Evelyn: I liked that at the end, the other kids did just want to go back to the village and rebuild. I was expecting them to be like, “yeah, let’s go save our family together,” but that’s not what happens, and I feel like that subverts our expectations as well.

Djèlí: I wanted that part to be different because I feel like that does happen in a lot of things. The “let’s go and get the gang together” trope. And having them saying, “I don’t want to be a hero, I’ve had enough. I want to go fish even though I hated fishing before.” “We’ve been through enough. We just want to go home.” That subverts the expectation that even Abeni had.

Evelyn: It shows something about their characters, though, that they are able to do it. That even as children, they’re able to rebuild their village.

Djèlí: Yeah, it’s this notion of elasticity, that ability of children to actually be stronger than you think they are. At one point, they’re weaker than you think, but on the other hand, they’re sometimes much more resilient.

Evelyn: So, I do want to talk about the upcoming book a little bit, if you’re willing. Is the series just one more book?

Djèlí: It is one more book for this world. Abeni and The Kingdom Gold came out in 2025 and what was great about that was I really got to expand the world. In the first one, she’s just in the forest, and in this one, she starts to see cities. She finds out the world is much bigger than she thought. I think she finds this out in the first book, but much more in the second one. This is a big sprawling world, and politics emerge that she doesn’t even understand. And her understanding of how the world works before that is like this little microcosm that she’s been trapped in with this forest in the little village. And so a lot of the second book is me building up the world, and her seeing the world. It also turns out the Witch Priest has a daughter, which was a big part of the second book as well, and allowed me to do multiple perspectives between the daughter as well as Abeni to give us these two things. The problem was I didn’t want her to steal the show because she’s such an interesting character. And so for the third one, you know, I opened up a lot of boxes in there with our friend Ekwolo that I’ve got to close. Also all the things that are moving to a head now, like this war is coming and everybody still having this search for their families. So the final one is going to be about closing those boxes.

Evelyn: I’m curious also about the secondary characters, like Zaneeya, and Naomi. I’m curious about where they came from and what you were thinking when you added them.

Djèlí: Yeah, that’s based a lot off of Spirited Away. I knew they were going to be part of the story, but I didn’t know how. I knew they couldn’t be in the beginning because it has to be after Asha turns back into a child, but part of the inspiration stemmed from my own love of reading books when I was that age, and my favorite part was reading about the heroine and the friend group. There’s got to be other people, this found family that they create, but I wanted there to still be tension between them. For example, Naomi is a lot of fun, but she’s also flighty.

Evelyn: Yeah, and she’s scared all the time.

Djèlí: Yeah, she’s scared all the time and not afraid to say it. She’ll even say “my whole family are cowards.” And Zaneeya is just extremely difficult, but she’s also somebody you want on your side, and it turns out that part of why she’s difficult is her own culture that she comes from. She doesn’t like mortals because she was raised to believe they were lesser, but it turns out that she does have a moral code to her as much as she tries to say she doesn’t. She will stand up to do the right thing when it’s necessary,

Evelyn: Even in the second book, I liked that you subverted the expectation of found family as well because I feel like in so many books, it’s “the Found Family comes together and they stay together and that’s it.” Like they’re always together, unless they’re forcefully separated. But then Songu decides to stay in the Kingdom of Gold, and I was sad about that but it also made so much sense.

Djèlí: Yeah, you were sad for Songu, and that makes sense because he has his own trauma to deal with. And it’s made even sadder because he doesn’t want to wander. He wanted to stay home, but because he was exiled, that option was taken away from him. As the reader, you know he wants a home. And by the end of the second book he feels like he’s found one and he’s not going to wander around anymore to find a second. Everybody else is looking for their family, but he knows that he left his family behind, so what is he looking for? And that’s why he decides he wants to stay there.

And something I deal with in the second book is the physical manifestation of trauma. It’s not like, “oh, everybody escapes without trauma and the trauma’s all gone.” The trauma in the form of magic still appears. Like with Abeni’s friends Fomi and Sowoke and all of them, it stayed with them. They’ve seen things, and because of that they can now do things they should not be able to do as children. It’s this physical manifestation of their trauma. And because Songu was in it even longer, he still has the full manifestation of the monster. He doesn’t know it’s there at first. But I wanted to kind of hint at it. Like when he can’t go past the barrier with the Masks, it’s only “regular mortals” who can. He’s wondering at that point “well, what’s wrong with me? Why can’t I?” but because of the Witch Priest, he’s been changed, and there’s no going back. He just has to deal with what he is now.

Evelyn: Speaking of the magic, can we talk about the Witch Priest please?

Djèlí: Now the Witch King.

Evelyn: Right.

Djèlí: Yeah, I mean, everybody likes a big baddie. Everybody likes it, but at the end of the day, you want to complicate your bad characters. Consider the Lord of the Rings for example, a long time ago I wrote a blog called “Getting Over My Anti Orc Bias.” You know, you know that we’re taught that Orcs are just plain bad. They’re the goons, right? But then people started asking questions, like, why are we doing this? Is this kind of racialized essentialism? What if orcs have families? What if orcs have free will?

Evelyn: Yes, that’s so interesting and I think that the Inheritance Cycle kind of dealt that a little bit too.

Djèlí: Yeah, is there is there a type of essentialist notion of things? Yeah, I love that. I think that changed the way I write. Pondering, “what if Orcs aren’t just inherently bad?” Yeah, and so in this book, you know, I have the Bat Riders. They still eat people. But, at the same time, they’re not terrible.

Evelyn: I read this book once that created this mythical beast called Stormwing that was meant to desecrate the bodies of soldiers on the battlefield after they had died. And so they’re the natural predator of humans and especially human war and suffering. And in that mythology it was born out of this woman’s hatred of war and suffering and the pain that comes with that. And so the Stormwings themselves are terrifying and disgusting to humans, but they’re our natural predators. So, it’s just a really fascinating concept.

Djèlí: Right, exactly. And in this one I have it where the Bat Riders are thinking, “well we don’t eat your people. We have war. We have a culture. We have values.” So, yeah, but to show that part of the world to Abeni was interesting because now she’s thinking, “I don’t understand the world at all. The world is a lot different than I thought.” And so  like the Bat Riders, even though the Witch Priest was my big bad, I still wanted to give him a purpose. So making him Asha’s brother complicated him. And that’s part of his purpose, but it’s also centered around this idea of the “fallen angel.” He just wants things to be back to the way they were in the beginning. He doesn’t like all this complication. Why can’t we just have it be simple? And that’s his thing. He’s a being of destruction and creation and he’s interested in how things were before everything exploded into what it is now, before the mortals, before the other spirits, he just wants to go back. And when I was writing, the question of “what does he want?” kept being brought up in my mind. He wants to rule, but he also wants to tear everything down. He destroys so that he can make it what he wants it to be. But in the end, there is also the complication of Fulan. He sometimes doesn’t like her or want her, but then he has moments that are almost affectionate: a weird father dynamic that’s somewhat mirrored by the Huntsman. I created this alternate kind of, where it’s like, he could be a terrible father, but he still had this concern. That’s why the Huntsman keeps saying, “don’t lose yourself to this.”

Evelyn: He’s fascinating too.

Djèlí: Yeah, he’s all about the hunt. He’s not an immoral character. He’s amoral. He’s just interested in doing his job. That’s it. His job is the hunt.

Evelyn: But in some ways, that kind of like works in the way that the audience wants Fulan to move. We want her to separate herself from the Witch Priest. And that’s kind of what the Huntsman is urging her to do.

Djèlí: Yeah, you have her father [The Witch Priest] who wants these things from her, and she wants to prove herself, but it turns out he’s hiding this big secret, and so she’s also dealing with this great betrayal. But she can’t separate that as we’ll see in book three. The question for her is going to become, “how do I separate that from the fact that I still want his love and what does that make me, since I still want this?” Even after knowing about his betrayal, she does all of this to kind of prove herself.

Evelyn: And now she has all that magic in her too.

Djèlí: Yeah, she has all of his magic. By the way, I can give a little hint for how book three will continue. He sure has been giving away a lot of magic hasn’t he? That’s not smart.

He just keeps on spreading himself a little bit thinner with the Kishi, the children, his other servants and warriors. He’s giving them power, and even that gives us this complicated view of him because he still wants power, but he’s now being impacted by this mortal girl who he adopted, in ways that he can’t understand.

Evelyn: And that’s a good foil to Abeni and Asha, too, because he has that similar relationship.

Djèlí: Andhe doesn’t realize it. To him, it’s just like, “why did I rescue this girl? What’s happening to me?” It’s this thing where in part of what he doesn’t understand is that he has been changed. He wants to go back, I guess is my thing about conservation. You can’t put genies back in the bottle, right? This has all been created. You have been impacted by it. You have been no less impacted than everyone else. It’s never going to be that again. That’s gone. That you is gone. And that’s something that he refuses to see, and Fulan’s the evidence of it.

Evelyn: I feel like Asha is also grating to him because she’s eternal change. She’s always changing and shifting.

Djèlí: Yep. Yeah. And he simply refuses to.

Evelyn: I did also read The Dead Cat Tail Assassins. Very different story, I know. But I want to talk about that too, because it’s so interesting, and this is more of a general question, but, besides the inspirations from your childhood, what made you want to write in the speculative genre altogether?

Djèlí: I kept reading them, even past childhood. I didn’t stop. Some people would stop and say “I used to read that stuff when I was a kid,” but I was like, “oh, I’m still reading them.” I’m still reading these. I still watch them. I’m going to turn it on anytime I get a chance, right? And so, I think it was just such a passion for me. Again, not everybody does that. Some people are content to go to the cons, they’re content to just read all kinds of stuff, but the more I read, I was thinking “you know, I think I want to try to actually write it.” And so, yeah my first love is fantasy, but I do actually like all the genres. I can write in all of them. It doesn’t matter to me. I think the only thing I haven’t written is hard science fiction.

So yeah, The Dead Cat Tail Assassins was kind of like my return to writing adult fantasy, which I hadn’t had a chance to really do. It’s a completely different, secondary world.

Evelyn: I’m curious about the lore in that. Can you talk a little bit about the world you built?

Djèlí: You can’t say, “oh, this is supposed to be Rome—supposed to be medieval Europe, or it’s supposed to be West Africa.” It’s nothing. It’s none of those things. It’s completely different. N.K. Jemisin used to say that “it’s like making a soup where the bone is just the flavor, and you don’t put anything else in.” And so if I were to use an analogy, I guess, I suppose creating something like Abeni’s Song is where you know what kind of soup it is. It’s chicken noodle soup. And it still has a mix. It’s definitely a mix of different cultures in there, but you still can identify as this chicken noodle soup, right? What I did with Dead Cat Tail Assassins was not quite N.K. Jemisin’s [bone soup], if I use the soup analogy it’s Gumbo or something. I put in all these different things. And so, for instance, in City Talibisi, you have to imagine medieval Swahili city states from East Africa, meets 16th century Renaissance Venice, meets 17th century London, meets Angkor Wat in Southeast Asia, Cambodia. There’s a bit of Mardi Gras, which I think a lot of people saw the Mardi Gras from my audience in the States. If they’re not from the United States, they said, “oh, this is a lot of Caribbean carnival.” Even like the putting the oil on themselves which is distinctly from Grenada carnival and Jap tradition with the torches and jumping behind the bands. So it’s all this hodgepodge. I wanted to create this world where you can tell little elements, but it’s still a secondary world, it’s not completely definable by any of our world’s standards.

Evelyn: I actually really, really liked that you placed it in a festival time. I thought that was such a smart and interesting move because it shows us so much about the culture that we wouldn’t otherwise get to see.

Djèlí: So I talk about this at times, but I used to teach World Civics and I used to talk about, you know, one of the things that we have is tourists who will go someplace, and we’ll see some culture like a Masai or something in Kenya during one of their festivals and think, “Oh, they do that all the time.” And they’re like, “no, that was a festival: like, every day for you is not Christmas. That was our festival. And then after that, it’s like, we just wear jeans and T-shirts.”  We have this idea where we kind of fix people in time, and I think about, for instance, the library of Congress has all of these photographs of Native Americans that are taken in the late 19th century, early 1900s. And they’re supposed to be some of the best photographs that give us a hint at Native American culture. The problem is, they’re all staged. They were all staged, and they were all trying to get this notion of the Native American culture that was unchanging. I guess that it’s kind of an Orientalism, that the East and the nonwestern cultures just don’t change and they kind of remain. And so I talk about how these photographs are fascinating because they do give you this great look into the culture in some ways, but I use it in my media class, like about how media can deceive you. It’s a deception because none of the people lived this way on a day-to-day basis. It’s like if you look at the picture I sent of somebody holding up a Santa Claus hat and an Easter Egg and a Halloween Jack-O-lantern and said this is what America’s like every day. And you would think “no, you’re just seeing a hodgepodge of their culture put together.”

Evelyn: I also wanted to talk about the ending of The Dead Cat Tail Assassins.

Djèlí: The Dead Cat Tail Assassins was fun to write because I decided to do an experiment. With everything else, Master of Djinn, Ring Shout, I had to do all this research and everything but with The Dead Cat Tail Assassins, I could just do what I wanted. I said, “what if I didn’t explain what was going on? What if I didn’t tell them until about three quarters into the book, exactly what was going on and how the shimmer was created?” And I thought, “but I’ve got to give readers a little bit at a time so they don’t revolt and put down the book because they don’t know what’s going on.” One person said, “you know, you did this so well in the background. I forgot. I didn’t remember that I was so curious about the Clockwork King.” I wrote the whole story of the Clockwork King and everything, and then, boom, I reveal it so that you’re like, “oh, that’s what happened.” So throughout, you’re hearing it like it’s a story within the story, and that’s what I wanted. So, the Clockwork King story is the story that you need to understand because now you understand he’s this jilted guy, he created this whole hazard because his lover left.

Evelyn: And the story is put on the backburner for us in the same way that it is for Evene. It’s there, but she’s not thinking about it actively as a part of her problem, so we’re not either.

Djèlí: Exactly. It’s not something that’s just there because it’s a part of the festival, and it’s not until they’re on that beach that you realize things are actually off. They’re actually different. Yeah, the two characters realize “oh, something’s off and we need to explain what happened.”

Evelyn: And that was done so well, too, because I had the same conclusion that the two main characters did of, “oh, time must have changed these factors in the town. That building could have been torn or knocked down and rebuilt on the other side of the river.” Time could definitely do things like that, so it didn’t occur to me that something might have actually been fundamentally different about their worlds.

Djèlí: It’s funny, years ago when you wrote a story about multiverses, no one knew what you were talking about. Now, thanks to Marvel and Everything, Everywhere All at Once, everybody knows what a multiverse is. And so multiversal stories are now kind of harder to do because you can’t be predictable. I’ve heard that people reading this story were saying things like, “you know, I wasn’t thinking this was multiverse story.” And I said, “it’s good you didn’t think it was.” I think what helped me was that, going into a fantasy, most people aren’t thinking of multiverses. They think of them as science fiction primarily. That’s true, but they don’t think of secondary world fantasy as technically having a type of multiverse side. I think in science fiction, people might have been like, “oh, yeah, this sounds like it might be a multiverse” because all the hints were there. But because it was for a fantasy audience, I think it was harder to catch, and that helped me to make it a surprise at the end. And so, with this story, I wanted to do all the tropes. I wanted to leave the little hints and see if anyone caught on.

And then there’s of course my goddesses. I couldn’t wait to do the goddesses. I always say that Dead Cat Tail Assassins, unlike my other stories Ring Shout or Master of Djinn, pretty much excluded politics. I wanted the story to not have overt politics, but it can’t help being political because, for one, the cover is not a cover I would have seen when I was younger. A cover with this dark-skinned black woman who is a main character. And then, you know, there’s politics about class in there too, and then there’s even politics in my choice of the goddesses. Because whenever I read books as a kid the gods sounded very Greek or Roman saying things like, “thee, thou.” And I wondered why they have to always sound like something out of a Shakespearean play. And I started thinking about what would happen if my goddesses just sounded completely different. I remember thinking to myself, “what if it was just like a Jamaican dance hall? They’re going to be Jamaican dance hall queens.” And I remember thinking to myself laughing, “this is so ridiculous. This is outrageous, but I’m going to do it, because why not?”

We’ve been taught that gods should sound “powerful and authoritative,” and in order to do that they have to have this almost old English type speech. I just wanted to do it differently. There’s something powerful about them having these Jamaican accents, even using Jamaican proverbs and things like that too.

Evelyn: And I liked that they were ruthless.

Djèlí: Yeah, super ruthless. Yeah, again I’m going to thank N.K. Jemisin. She makes her gods very godly and other-worldly. You get the idea very quickly that these are not mortal beings. They don’t act like mortals. And that’s how I wanted these goddesses to be at the end of the day. They’re ruthless because they’re assassin gods.

Evelyn: The first thing I ever read related to gods was Percy Jackson, and I always wondered “why aren’t these gods understanding what they’re putting them through? Why aren’t they getting it?” And then someone, I don’t remember who, told me that it would be like if you were told that you were running a kingdom of ants and you had to choose whether or not to kill one ant or twenty ants and you’re like, I don’t really care, they’re ants.

Djèlí: That’s exactly it, that’s how they look at us. They exist on another plane where to them we’re ants, right? Maybe there’s something beyond them even that thinks of them as ants? It keeps on going and going, but that’s a good analogy.

Evelyn: Can you tell us about the ending?

Djèlí: I had it end brutally because it’s a dark story.

I had two Hugo winning, well-known writers read the story and they said, “it was good, but that ending was a little harsh. Maybe you could like change the ending.” But because of who my goddesses were, and who Evene is, and who the evil guy is, doing a live evisceration felt like how it needed to end. Even so, it’s our main protagonist and you know, I worried that people wouldn’t identify with her if it ended that way. But she’s an assassin, and because of that we can’t relate to her in all ways. That’s my whole point. This is a dark story where even your main people slit people open. Sky at the end does it too, and you can see hints of how she becomes Evene. There’s something in her already that’s there waiting to become an assassin.

Evelyn: I was shocked by it, but I also thought it made sense. The main villain is horrible, and it poetically works.

Djèlí: It was also to drive home the point that they are ruthless. We as people are not in the jobs of killing people. And even though Evene is different from the gods, who are much more ruthless than she is, or even the other Assassins like the skeleton guy, he’s still ruthless because she is in the job of killing people.

Evelyn: But she does have a moral code.

Djèlí: Yeah. It’s just that I feel like the other dead cattails, they don’t have a moral code at all except maybe the Old Man.

Evelyn: Can you tell us more about his character?

Djèlí: He wants to see games. He’s kind of godly in that way, too, of wanting to mess with people. And he’s off-putting because he looks like a kid, but he shouldn’t be a kid. He’s a cold killer.  I was actually going to give him a sidekick who was a kind of giant, steampunk teddy bear that was rotting on one side so you could see the metal skull. I wanted it to be terrifying with these long claws, and it didn’t say anything but “grrrr” like Groot.

Everyone tells me that I should have kept it.

Evelyn: What was the reason for it being there?

Djèlí: Just aesthetics. It was just cool. I wanted The Old Man to have a balloon too, but I couldn’t figure out how that would work. Even though it was a secondary world, I’m playing around with the idea of steampunk and clockwork. Just steampunk fantasy essentially, so my question became “would a teddy bear fit in this world? Would a balloon fit in this world?”

I don’t know if you ever seen Arcane [Netflix animated series]?

Evelyn: I’ve heard of it.

Djèlí: They do a good job in creating the secondary world where it’s fantasy, but it’s also modern, and so it’s always this question of “how modern do I make things?” There’s definitely clockwork things in there, but what is too far? I didn’t know if a balloon might be too far.

Evelyn: In my stories I have trouble including phones because of that. Like, touchscreen phones is just a line that I never want to cross for some reason.

Djèlí: Right. So when do you set your story then? Or do they not exist in this world?

Evelyn: They’re set in this world, but most of my characters are usually too young to have phones.

Djèlí: That’s a good one, yeah.

Evelyn: That or their parents are like, “no, you don’t need a phone yet” or whatever.

Djèlí: There’s a whole talk about how phones complicate so much in literature.

I used to watch X- Files when I was younger, and I was like, man, if Scully and Mulder had a phone, half their problems would be like, “oh, I figured it out. Got it.” Or they could just call each other and say “yeah, that happened, I won’t go over there. Got it.” But not having a phone just adds to the suspense level of the story.

Evelyn: I guess the main character in my novel is old enough to have a phone, but she just doesn’t. She’s 13, but if she had a phone, it would change the dynamics of her loneliness. And so I just couldn’t figure out how to make something like that work.

Djèlí: It’s hard. The modern world has changed things. When you have all of the information you need at your fingertips, even doing a mystery becomes a matter of looking things up. I don’t necessarily need to go hunt out anything. It says right here what I need to know. And people have managed to adapt. But I think about police procedures I used to watch on television when they started getting phones; how that changed everything. No more going down and talking to the guy and digging through all these files. I just look it up right here. I just call him.

Evelyn: I haven’t read all of your books, so I don’t know if you do have male main characters, but why do you like writing from a female perspective?

Djèlí: Let me see. So, The Haunting of Tram Car 015, which is set in the Djinn universe, is told by two male detectives. Two male investigators, but there are a lot of women in there, and the background is a suffrage movement. My answer is, I don’t know. The majority of my stories just happened to have women and girls as main characters, and I tend to think of the characters before I think of the story. I can’t unsee it after that. With Abeni’s Song, I thought her up before everything else and that’s how it started. So the ones with the male characters, those have them, just because they were there already. 

Evelyn: A lot of my writing is like that too, where there’s some things that are just there and it has to be that way, and I can’t make up something else.

Djèlí: I couldn’t make up anybody else for Master of Djinn. I saw Fatima in that suit in the beginning and that was it. I couldn’t, I couldn’t imagine the story if I gender-swapped it.

Evelyn: For my last question, are there any new projects you’re working on besides Abeni’s Song?

Djèlí: I have other projects I’ve put to the side because book three has to get done. It’s already way behind schedule, but I’m working on a story that’s set in 1930s Ethiopia during the Italian occupation. Italian invasion. It’s like Captain America meets Indiana Jones, except the main character is a heroine with mechanical arms. She’s a pinup girl and she has a comic book and she goes off to fight. But, it’s going to get weirdly cosmic horror before it’s done.