Interview: Annell López
I had the pleasure of chatting with Annell López, author of the award-winning debut short story collection I’ll Give You a Reason over coffee after work in New Orleans, where we both live and write. I’ll Give You a Reason introduces readers to a kaleidoscopic chorus of characters from The Ironbound, a largely immigrant neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey. We meet frustrated students and teachers, young widows, and new lovers.
I’ve been a fan of Annell’s short fiction for quite a while—a sticker version of her book cover resides on my laptop—and so admire the tenderness and vibrancy with which she portrays her characters in all their messiness. It was a thrill to hear Annell’s thoughts on writing about sensitive topics like colorism, sex, and rage, and to nerd out with her about writing playlists and inspirations.
—Marguerite Sheffer
Marguerite Sheffer: Thank you for speaking with me about I’ll Give You a Reason! I so loved this collection and keep returning to these different voices. The stories center on The Ironbound, a neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey, particularly the experiences of immigrant and first-generation Americans living there. We both live and write in New Orleans. Can you speak to writing a place-based collection from a remove? What were the pluses or minuses or challenges or techniques of that?
Annell López: I think that distance worked as an advantage. I had many experiences in this place in the past, which I was able to speak to more clearly because I wasn’t there anymore, places that I could examine—how they function and the relationship that they have to people—because I wasn’t there anymore. I think that sometimes being in a place can cause tunnel vision. So, I think that in this case, just being away from Newark helped me think about Newark as a character, because I was able to separate myself and my feelings from the place. That distance granted me, in a way, the ability to be more objective. Those were the pluses. In terms of challenges, there were moments where I did have to wonder: Is that the right street? Is that where that thing is? But those logistical questions about what exists in a place can be researched.
MS: Did you ever struggle to reenter memories or experiences of Newark? And how did you deal with that?
AL: I didn’t struggle to reenter memories. Yes, I’ll Give You a Reason is a book heavily about setting, but it’s also about point of view and perspective. I tried to enter Newark each and every time from the perspective of different characters. So the challenge was more so: How do I embody this character? And how does this character feel about this place? How do they view Newark? How do they move around Newark? To me, setting is really all about character perspective.
MS: The characters across many of the stories, particularly “Dark Vader” and “Jászárokszállás, Hungary, or Newark, New Jersey, or Anywhere, USA” deal with being otherized because of their Blackness. The whole collection shows characters experiencing, but not wholly defined by, race in America in the 2010s and 2020s. Can you say more about how you write about race and how a short story collection in particular can deal with race?
AL: I go back to setting again. I have my own thoughts about race and what it’s like to be a person who looks like myself, like a Black woman, a Black woman of Latino origin.
I think that for the collection, I approach race in terms of what I felt was representative of Newark around that time. What does it look like in Newark? Or what did it look like in Newark in the 2010s, during the first Trump presidency? I tried to approach that in a way that I felt would be representative of what these characters would be experiencing if they were real people in that very real place. I thought to myself: How do I document reality? If there is something positive about it, then I’ll show that. And if there’s something negative, then it’ll be that. I felt I was putting on a historian, documentarian hat. I’m showing a light, just telling what I see. Clearly, I’m not objective, but I felt like I was just representing the truth. I think when it comes to race in a collection or a novel or anything, really, truth is the goal.
MS: As someone who was a young white teacher working in schools in Oakland, California, back in the 2010s, I especially loved “The World as We Know It,” where you write from the perspective of a young white teacher living with his girlfriend, another young white teacher working in The Ironbound. Could you tell me about that story’s process?
AL: Yeah, that was a hard story to write. I was challenging myself as a writer. I’m writing from a point of view that is different from mine in terms of demographics, right? I’m not a white woman, or in this case, I’m not a white guy. An additional challenge was that the story is written in the first-person point of view. I wanted to portray Newark as a landscape, a portrait of Newark. You have immigrants, you have first-generation Americans, but you also have transplants. You also have people who are actively gentrifying the neighborhood. And so, it would have been a miss for me to not write from that perspective as well, if I wanted to tell the truth of this place. So that was important for me. These are gentrifiers, but they’re also people. I couldn’t let my feelings as someone living in a place that was getting gentrified—and is getting gentrified—get in the way of seeing the humanity of a character. I don’t want these people to be caricatures. I want these people to be people. Even if I don’t agree with their politics, or their savior behavior gets on my nerves.
MS: Well, I think you nailed it. I love that story. And it was appropriately frightening to read.
AL: That’s great. I was going for scary.
MS: Switching gears massively, there is a lot of sex in the book, ranging from surprising, to intimate, to uncomfortable, to desperate, to powerful. I would just like to throw a very open-ended question at you. How does sex function in the collection, and how do you approach writing sex?
AL: There is a song by the ’90s band Garbage. It’s titled “Sex Is Not the Enemy.” That’s a personal motto for me, especially when it comes to my writing, because I feel like sex is very characterizing, right? It tells so much about a person. As a writer, I want to know my character at the most intimate levels. Even if I don’t end up writing about their sex lives, I should imagine in my head what their sex lives look like. If I fully want to know what this person is like, I want to know what they would order if they went to Popeyes drive-thru. And what do they look like when they’re having sex? And what is their coffee order? What temperature do they keep their house? At what volume do they listen to their music? I think sex is just another detail that people tend to shy away from. Sex is also very human and an indication of desire. And desire is the root of all good fiction—another reason sex is not the enemy.
MS: That’s awesome. I want to talk a little bit about anger because I remember when I first started this collection, the thing that hooked me in immediately was a feeling of anger.
There are several characters who struggle with feeling or being trapped, overlooked, unheard or unrecognized, especially in some of the earlier stories. Can you say more about evoking anger in fiction? Was that a goal?
AL: Anger is one of those emotions and topics, again like sex, that I feel people shy away from. For my characters specifically, they inhabit bodies that are policed and are often forced to code-switch, or they are people who constantly have to tame their emotions or don’t get to live the expanse and the truth of their emotions, which happens to women. Which happens specifically to women of color: you can’t be that angry person because clearly someone’s going to say something about your anger. I wanted these characters to be free and for their anger to be visible because it felt true to their realities and because it was important for me to play around with the idea of release. Everyone deserves to have that outlet, that moment where they can just really let it go. In writing something that is about race, about the American dream, about sex in many ways, about Blackness, body image, and political unrest, anger has a place there—a very justified place there. It was at the forefront of the emotions that I wanted to infuse my work with.
MS: Several of the stories in I’ll Give You a Reason played wonderfully with my expectations. I don’t want to give anything away for those who have not read the collection yet, but some stories seemed to be heading toward either danger or a heartwarming resolution, and then took a drastic turn sideways, ultimately satisfying me as a reader in a very different way than I had expected. Was this something you had in mind while you were writing?
AL: Yes, I think that when a book does subvert my expectations, I find it more fun and interesting. Otherwise, the reader can get too comfortable. Also, human beings subvert expectations all the time.
MS: Were you writing these stories as a collection?
AL: I was. I’ve been a reader of short stories for a long, long time. I’ve been reading more short stories than novels for over a decade of my life. And I knew that early on that I wanted to write about Newark. I knew that I wanted to tell the story of a place; I knew that the thing that would pull them together would be setting. I knew that thematically everything was going to be very true to the neighborhood. In some way or another, we’re all living the same lives. So the setting and themes were going to continue to reappear. But I became more intentional in making the stories more cohesive as I went along. But I knew that that’s what I wanted from the start. At some point, I became aware of how many young characters there were. The collection is not young adult, but I used a lot of young voices. It didn’t surprise me. My comfort zone was writing younger people. But that’s also not all of the setting I was trying to portray. I needed to move outside of that comfort zone.
MS: Could you say more about writing young voices outside the realm of young adult?
AL: In terms of writing young voices, I will credit anything that I know, or anything I’m doing well, to having spent over ten years as a teacher in the classroom. High schoolers are fully formed people, with fully formed desires, and there’s nothing childish about those desires. Yeah, they can be silly as people, but there’s nothing immature about what they want and the intensity of how they want. So, I always approach a young voice with a lot of respect, because this young person is someone who knows themselves. A young voice has a degree of authority, and to me that’s important. They all own their experiences, and they have authority over how they feel; they feel justified in how they feel; they understand how they feel. I think that it’s easy to assume that a young character or a young person is living in this eternal sort of confusion, and that’s not always the case. I think that young people have a lot of clarity that sometimes older adults don’t have, or sometimes we lose as we get older.
MS: I see a thread of characters living double lives or dreaming of alternate, parallel lives in several of the stories. I’m thinking particularly of “The Other Carmen” and “The Fake Wife.” What is the power of these other lives for these characters?
AL: Personally, I love fantasizing about parallel lives, alternate lives, and alternate realities. When you’re stuck in an undesirable situation, whether a relationship or a job, it’s nice to get lost in the possibilities of an alternate reality. I wanted my characters to indulge in that kind of fantasizing because, in a way, it means they’re holding on to hope. If we can dream of another reality, we can wish that different reality for ourselves, I think.
MS: I want to talk a bit about your novel, which I know you are at work on right now. Do you see your novel as connected to or building on this collection? Or is it exploring a totally new avenue? What do you feel comfortable telling us at this point?
AL: The novel is very connected to I’ll Give You a Reason—it’s an expansion of one of the stories. We see Nina from “Bear Hunting Season” in the past, before she’s a widow (as she is in the collection). We see her as a teenager, then after the death of her husband, while doing group therapy and reentering the world, trying to find her way as a person, while being grief-stricken.
MS: That’s so exciting! I can’t wait to read it and return to Nina’s story. Thank you again for taking the time to talk with me.
MARGUERITE SHEFFFER is a writer who lives in New Orleans. Her debut short story collection, The Man in the Banana Trees (University of Iowa Press), won the Iowa Short Fiction Award and is longlisted for the 2025 PEN/ Robert W. Bingham Prize. Her stories appear in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Epiphany, The Adroit Journal, The Offing, SmokeLong Quarterly, and The Cosmic Background, among other magazines. Find her on Instagram @mlensheffer.
ANNELL LÓPEZ is the winner of the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize and the author of the short story collection I’ll Give You a Reason (Feminist Press, 2024), which is longlisted for the 2025 PEN/ Robert W. Bingham Prize. A Peter Taylor Fellow at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshops, her work has also received support from Tin House and has appeared in Guernica, American Short Fiction, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Common, Brooklyn Rail, Refinery29, and elsewhere. López received her MFA from the University of New Orleans. She is working on a novel. Find her on Instagram @annellthebookbabe.
