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Then he started the imprint of Megascope and said, ‘I’m thinking about doing a Count of Monte Cristo in outer space.’ I’d just finished reading this book about Alexandre Dumas’s father. “John and I are both comic-book heads, so we got together and did our comic book Box of Bones. Then a friend of mine introduced me to John Jennings, and John did the cover for the second and third books. I tend to reward them with everything I’ve got. I’m pretty loyal when people give me a shot. You should send it to Gavin Grant at Small Beer Press.’ That’s why the Liminal books live there. I sent it to Nalo Hopkinson, who had been a champion of mine ever since I was a shitty writer, and she said, ‘You know what, I think this is good. But I started thinking of the book as my calling card as this sort of beginning. The copyediting was wrong, the type of paper was wrong, the size was wrong – all these things. I made every single mistake you could make as a self-publisher. I was so frustrated with the publishing industry, I decided to self-publish. “So I took one of the characters from that novel and I just made it about him and tried to do a straightforward – as straight as I can do – missing-person/crime/noir thing. ‘What the fuck, who says that? Who says write simple? Fuck you! You want something simple? I’ll write something simple!’ Have you ever thought about writing something simpler?’ An editor said that to me, and I just got angry. ‘This is some really great science fiction novel unfortunately, we only publish fantasy.’ Or, ‘This is a really great fantasy novel unfortunately, we only publish science fiction.’ Finally someone said, ‘Hey, look – this is great writing, but this is a really complex story. I joined a writers’ group and all that, and I got some of the best rejection letters on the planet. Butler – folks that I started reading early and thought, ‘Okay, I’ll write like them.’ I wrote a really shitty novel that was 700 pages, and then wrote a decent novel that was 400 pages, and then wrote another decent novel and decided to send it out. Andrew Vachss is one of them, and Walter Mosley, of course, and Octavia E. “There were some prose writers I really respected too. Eventually I decided, ‘Well, I just gotta write novels.’ I was working with unpublished artists, though, and maybe I just picked the wrong people, who weren’t serious, but it was just impossible for me to get something going with an artist. Adrian Tomine and Richard Sala and all these famous comic folks used to come in, and I was trying to make comics. When I first came out to California, I started working at Comic Relief in Berkeley – it was a pivotal comic book store. I want to write comics.’ I was super comics-focused. “Comics were the thing that got me into writing writers like Chris Claremont, of X-Men, were my ideal: ‘That’s what I want to do. My uncle said, ‘You can read.’ He bought me a bunch of comics and said, ‘I’ll buy you more if you can tell me what each one was about.’ I said, ‘Got it.’ I went through them, boom boom boom boom boom. I was dyslexic, and I was going to get left back in the second grade because they thought I couldn’t read. Before the movies, before everything, I was one of those kids. I still believe that my destiny is to write for the X-Men comic books. “I was reading comics from the time I was eight or nine years old, and then started reading other books.

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He also writes comics, including “ethno-gothic” horror series Box of Bones in collaboration with John Jennings (2021). Jama-Everett began publishing with SF novel The Liminal People (2011), launching a series that continued with The Liminal War (2015) and The Entropy of Bones (2015). He currently lives in Oakland CA, where he works as a therapist. He has a master’s degree in divinity, another in clinical psychology, and recently finished his MFA in literature at UC Riverside. He has traveled widely, including in Asia, Mexico, and North Africa.

AYIZE JAMA-EVERETT was born in 1974 in Harlem NY.

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