“I like to read sentences that twirl”: An Interview with Janelle Bassett
by Manasseh Awuni
Schooner Graduate Research Assistant Manasseh Awuni recently spoke to Janelle Bassett about her collection Thanks for This Riot, winner of the 2023 Raz/Shumaker Book Prize in Fiction. Thanks for This Riot was published by University of Nebraska Press in 2024.
Manasseh Awuni: Something that I felt unites these stories is the way the characters appear to be probing their world and inviting the reader to seek the answers together as the events unfold. What was the process of putting together this collection? Did you write the stories independently of each other and later decide to put them together, or did you write them with the collection in mind?
Janelle Bassett: The process was very piecemeal. I thought of each story as its own complete and individual project, but after a few years of writing I had enough stories that they could technically be slapped together to become book-length. And the first draft of my collection was very much slapped together. I had enough stories to create a collection, but that didn’t mean they worked together as one cohesive book. Also, the first version of my collection was made of my earliest work. And some of it was…early work. A little rough. A little obvious.
As I kept writing, I replaced some of the stories with new work that felt stronger or more relevant. Once I came up with the idea to group the stories by type of riot, the manuscript felt more like a proper collection, more intentional, even though I didn’t write the stories to fit into the riot categories. I like to give the illusion of intention. Ta-da!
MA: Of the fifteen stories in the collection, only two—“All I Need Are These Four Walls and Some Positive Feedback” and “Bulk Trash Is for Lovers”— are told in the third person. The rest are in the first-person narrative style. In all the thirteen first-person narratives, however, each voice sounds refreshingly different, even the humor. What informed your decision to employ mainly the first person, and how did you develop the distinctive voice for each of your narrators?
JB: I’m glad the voices felt distinct to you! I write in first-person because I tend to inhabit the characters and sort of mentally “act out” what they do and what they think. I generally don’t see them from the outside or from above, nor do I necessarily decide what the characters should say or do—I slip into them and see what happens. I think this method is limiting, in a way, but it seems to be how I do it!
As I become or inhabit different types of characters, their individual voices come out. And I think I use a fair amount of mimicry, too, when taking on these personas. Mimicking people I know or have seen from afar. Or mimicking a type of person. It’s like a very lonely, internal one-woman play, my writing process.
MA: When I started reading “Prove It,” my interest was in whether Candice would succeed where her predecessors failed. When she meets her difficult and lying audience, however, she tells them to add one lie to the three facts about themselves, and they can hardly tell a lie. In this story, as well as in “Enviable Levels,” I was fascinated with the way you explore human psychology and behavior. What interests you most about human psychology? What types of research, if any, went into the writing of this collection and these two stories in particular?
JB: I am interested in the way people get their needs met. I’m especially interested in moral, thoughtful people who are also wounded in some way, which makes them needy. This creates friction between what they need from others and the ideal relationships they might have with the people around them if they didn’t require so much validation, distance, attention, reassurance, etc. Those dynamics are so complex and fraught, which makes them extra juicy to explore.
I didn’t do any technical research for the book, other than observation and general nosiness. “Enviable Levels” was written when my kids were pretty young, an all-consuming time when it felt like my life would be easier if I didn’t have so much of my own selfish spark. With the expectations-lowering surgery, I wanted to explore the idea that it would be easier to be a caretaker if you were able to stop wanting to do anything else.
MA: In some pieces in the collection, I found the weight of the story rests in a sentence or paragraph. In “These New Francescas,” for instance, Rhea’s interpretation of the painting of children does that magic when she says, “I think it’s about missing your mother.” The last sentence of “Safe Distances” (“And my child, my lovable, merciful child…”) appears to reveal a deeper clue about the relationship between Tina and Gia. What is your writing process like, on a sentence level? Do some lines come to you before arriving at the scene? How do you handle emotionally charged moments as you’re working?
JB: Once I started writing more flash I became very serious about sentences. Not so much that I began trying to craft perfect sentences, more that I had no use for or patience with boring sentences. I like to read sentences that twirl. I like, too, when people say things out loud that are more devastating than they realized. Truer than they expected. Or, like with Rhea’s line, are tossed off as nothing but their meaning lands on someone else with a thud.
I don’t generally think about specific lines or wording other than as I’m writing them. The process is more improvisational than intellectual. One exception is the first line of a flash I wrote, From Yoyo. The first line is “I learned the word fuck from a girl named Yoyo,” which is a true statement. I had that line in my head for years before I built a flash behind it. That line is still stuck in my head, actually. Those might be my last words someday.
MA: “Prove It,” with its tension, suspense, depth, and humor, is my favorite story. Asking a writer to name their favorite work, especially in a collection of great stories, can be like asking a mother to declare one child as her favorite openly. But which story in the collection would you say is your favorite and why?
JB: Let’s see! There’s not one that springs to mind as the clear frontrunner. Usually the most recent story is my favorite. Or, not even my favorite—the only one I like at all!
Thanks for saying such kind things about “Prove It.” That story is special to me, too, because I savored the process of writing it. I didn’t rush or fuss, and unfortunately I really tend toward rushing and fussing. I took my time and enjoyed living inside the confines of that world. Plus that story genuinely surprised me as it went and ended up feeling much more personal and revelatory than I had expected. I felt a bit exposed by it, like I gave away more of myself than I had intended to. But then I decided that was a cool feeling.
My favorite story to read aloud has become “All I Need are These Four Walls and Some Positive Feedback.” That story has this light, innocent energy that builds toward violent defiance and that’s fun to bring to life and perform in front of people who assume I’m normal.
Janelle Bassett‘s story collection Thanks for This Riot won the Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize in Fiction and was published by University of Nebraska Press in 2024. The collection was also longlisted for the 2025 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. Her writing appears in The Rumpus, Indiana Review, Smokelong Quarterly, American Literary Review, Cutbank, Washington Square Review, Wigleaf, and Best Microfiction. She lives in St. Louis and works in a public library.
Manasseh Azure Awuni is a Ghanaian investigative journalist and the author of four nonfiction books: Voice of Conscience (2016), Letters to My Future Wife (2017), The Fourth John: Reign, Rejection & Rebound (2019), Investigative Journalism in Africa: A Practical Manual (2023), and The President Ghana Never Got (2024). Awuni was a Nieman Journalism Fellowship at Harvard University for the 2023-2024 academic year. He studied for a B.A. in Communication Studies at the Ghana Institute of Journalism (GIJ) and an M.A. in the same field at the University of Ghana. He is pursuing an M.A. in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, focusing on Creative Writing.