NA: Just before I go, tell me what got you started as a poet and what poetry mean to you?

LS: It’s hard to go through boarding school and not find yourself and your friends creating naughty limericks but I guess you could say I started writing serious poetry at university. I had a really inspirational creative writing teacher who always seemed quite impressed with what I produced. When I graduated, I was lucky enough to live near the University of Ibadan where I became acquainted with several seasoned poets.

You know sometimes when you go a party and you find yourself sitting in a lonely corner because you don’t know anyone and suddenly some unlikely person sits near you, sparks of a great conversation and you just know you’ll be life-long friends? Well that’s how I’ve come to feel about poetry. I didn’t think we’d come this far together but we have and it’s great. it is there when I need it, just like a good friend is.

NA: What are the poetry books that have left the most marks on your mind?

LS: I have always liked Once by Alice Walker. Christopher Okigbo’s Labyrinths and Chinweizu’s Energy Crisis are constant travel companions.

NA: Is there a poem or story that has ever changed and, or continue to affect the way you live your life?

LS: The poem that has had the greatest influence on me as a person is ‘Phenomenal Woman’ by Maya Angelou, probably because it told me just what I needed to hear at the time I read it.

NA: Well, that figures, doesn’t it. Thanks Lola, it has been fun to chat with you. Good luck with Harlot (not an autobiography!), For The Love of Flight, and Chief Giridi and his Mysterious Spirits.

LS: Thanks Nnorom.

©2004 Nnorom Azuonye. www.nnoromazuonye.com All rights reserved.
Reprint permissions You can buy Lola Shoneyin’s books “So All The Time I Was Sitting On An Egg” and “Song Of A Riverbird” at www.africabookcentre.com