I've spent a lot of my adult life in East Africa, too, and I do still go there. That area of the world is part of my contemporary experience-my actual, continued life. Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania, these countries and places in them are not particularly weird or exotic to me, and I don't primarily, or only, associate them with my childhood.

By that I mean that East Africa is not, for me, a symbolic repository of 'memories'; it's definitely not a mythical or charmed, mysterious region of my imagination. The capital cities, the more provincial and coastal towns, and the rural areas I've been in, they're just places, like wherever a person has grown up or worked or lived is just an ordinary place. I can't write, yet, about places I've never been or seen-so, like most writers, I'm working with what I've got.

And at the moment the fact is I've spent more of my life in East Africa than elsewhere, though at this point I've been in the U.S. for a rather long time, too. I'm trying very hard to get to Kenya and to Mozambique next year. N. S. Köenings holds a BA in African studies from Bryn Mawr College and a PhD in sociocultural anthropology from Indiana University, where she completed her MFA in fiction. She has lived in East Africa and Europe. She is currently teaching at Hampshire College, in Massachusetts.

Books by N. S. Köenings

Theft

by N. S. Köenings