and in 2023 was noted by the ASME. Her Blues history work is featured heavily in Mississippi Folklife Magazine.
FSG's inaugural Writer's Fellow, Citchens's highly-anticipated debut novel is Dominion.
My Q&A with the author:
How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?Visit Addie E. Citchens's website.
The title Dominion shoves readers into the book, and ultimately, for me, the moral of the story is that the concept of dominion itself is both relative to the forces at hand and dependent upon the willingness of other entities to be subjected. I don’t know if I’m supposed to say this, but I have a love/hate relationship with my title. It feels powerful, yet literal. The first title, or rather the working title was In the Image of the Beast, which also felt literal, though, so I don’t know. I’ve never been good at titles. Dominion was a joint effort, which I could dig, but I sometimes wish I would have held out until we could come up with something even harder and more poignant.
What's in a name?
Emanuel’s name is the most deliberately chosen in Dominion, but otherwise, as a lover of interesting names period, I didn’t mean to be symbolic in naming this characters, but after the fact, I can see how some of the names could be seen as so. Most of the time I have to rehash the beginning of a story over and over to find a name for a character that sticks with me, and for me, factors like how it would sound read aloud in my head for however many times it appears in a text fare heavily. I have to really fuck with it to want to keep saying it. Rarely do my characters start out with permanent names. In my short story “A Good Samaritan,” featured in The Paris Review, I almost avoid naming folks altogether.
How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?
My teenage self would not be surprised at all at Dominion. I’ve been writing this, via observation of the community around me, for most of my life.
Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?
Almost all of my stories begin assertively as hell, so I will say beginnings almost always come out exactly how they will stay for however long I am working on the project. I usedto have endings in mind when I wrote, but I’ve learned not to marry myself to anything in the text or force anything to be. Endings change as my relationship to my characters change and as they themselves evolve in the text. I don’t mind changing endings until it feels right.
Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?
My characters all have some aspect of me, even the minor ones. I’m a person with a lot of strange habits and aversions, so I stick a piece of me all throughout my stories. I don’t have kids, so this is my version of spreading my genetic code about.
What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?
Music of all types influences my writing. I walk in the French Quarter and people watch. I walk through Treme and people watch. Watching people and being nosy influences my work. Life is like theater of the living. Social media, cat behavior, exercise, YouTube videos—there’s inspiration in almost everything for me.
--Marshal Zeringue