Tochi Onyebuchi
Sometimes, quarantine means doing FaceTime Clambake sessions with a dear friend making quite a name for himself in the world of YA Afrofuturist lit.
1. Dope Vitals: Author, essayist, vagabond scribbler. Born in MA, raised in CT. Consummate New Englander.
2. Dopest Thing Done: Put my mom in the same room as SCOTUS Justice Sonia Sotomayor. I was doing an event with Justice Sotomayor for a picture book she'd just released, and I arranged for Mom to arrive at the venue early so she could spend some time in the Green Room with us. After a bit, I moved off to the side while Mom held court with one of the most powerful women in the entire world. Of course, Mom insisted pictures be taken.
3. Dopest Thing to Do: Get Mom in a room with Oprah. Even though O's not the embodiment of perfection (see American Dirt and her Rodman interview way back when), she gave my mother countless hours of joy and solace and thoughtfulness. In many ways, for Mom, an immigrant, Oprah. represented the American Ideal. Mom and Oprah wouldn't even have to be on TV or streaming anywhere. I just want Mom to meet an idol. In some ways, it would bring a certain full-circle-ness to Mom's journey to and through this country.
4. Dope Fact about Tochi: To the extent that I play pool, I play pool as a lefty, though I am functionally right-handed.
5. A Dope Life that Inspires Tochi: Patrick Radden Keefe, who most recently wrote Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland. It's about the 1972 kidnapping and murder of a woman by the Provisional IRA during The Troubles and is true crime in the way that David Grann's Killers of the Flower Moon is true crime, that is to say it's a window opening out onto the much larger sociopolitical context of the time. Keefe went to law school at Yale, and I started following his career probably in 2011 or so. He does these incredible investigative pieces about international crime that are just remarkable feats of journalism, and I think most of his pieces have a home in The New Yorker. 2017, he wrote this huge piece on the Sackler family and he's done work on El Chapo. I discovered him at a time when my love for narrative non-fiction and long-form journalism had exploded, and this was as I was getting ready to go to law school, even though I had my heart set on a career as a writer. Keefe was evidence that nothing is wasted.
6. Where You Can Catch Tochi Being Dope: Anywhere books are sold. My latest title is Riot Baby from Tor.com and before that, my young adult scifi novel War Girls. Its sequel, Rebel Sisters, drops this October. I'm also immensely online, perhaps *too* online, and you can find me at Twitter @TochiTrueStory and on Instagram @treize64. Also, my website, tochionyebuchi.com is a pretty good repository for all relevant information concerning me.
Tochi’s Key to Living a Dope and Doing Dope Things
Love what you love loudly. That is to say, be not ashamed of your artistic influences or sources of inspiration. I came of age just as Toonami first began as a programming block on Cartoon Network. Unless you were a heavy anime head who could track down bootleg VHS tapes of Neon Genesis Evangelion, that 2-hour block from 4-6pm was your only tasting of anime for the day. But my generation got to watch it grow from this thing you didn't quite tell your friends you were into to a truly global cross-cultural thing. Rappers get asked about their anime influences. People make trap beats on YouTube and set them to looped fight scenes. The Wachowski Sisters aren't shy about Ghost in the Shell's influence on The Matrix. Folks will tell you about how they hum the theme song to Naruto Shippuden in the shower ("Silhouette" is an undefeated banger.) "Be Yourself" isn't always the clearest or most translatable advice; I find "love what you love" to be much more actionable and, if I'm keeping it a buck, much more helpful.