Opportunity for Writers! Stories and human existence are entwined, each compelling and coaxing meaning from the other. As testament to this enduring and primordial relationship, the Stories They Forgot to Tell: An Anthology of Nigerian Short Stories announces a new literary project, to be published in 2027 by Narrative Landscape Press, Lagos (@NarrativeLscape). The anthology aims to apprehend the contemporary era of storytelling in Nigeria by bringing together the best of emergingand established voices that reflect the diversity, vitality, and insistence of modern Nigerian imagination in fiction. Read full detail here: opencountrymag.com/submit-to…

“The book was a sort of monument to my childhood, a small shrine of memories. In a picture from my confirmation aged thirteen, I wore a puff- sleeved dress. Plaits sprouted from my head like twigs and ribbons streamed from their ends, prayers knotted to branches. She had kept my letters from university, a swatch of red fabric and a white rose, pressed yellow with age.” There were some loose pictures of my mother and her sister when they were girls. Aunt Caryl was tall, almost scrawny, with her red hair disguised by sepia. My mother was smaller and sleeker with shiny black curls. My mother looked like a Bain, dark hair and blue eyes, a winning combination that obscured the plainer family features of thin lips and a weak chin. Aunt Caryl was an alien, or adopted, or ask the milkman. In the months I avoided the trunk, it occurred to me that information about my father might be inside. I was very curious about him in my childhood. I knew his name, Francis Aggrey. I knew that he had arrived in England in the late sixties to go to university. I knew he had lodged in the spare attic room of my grandfather’s house, and that he and my mother had some sort of affair. When he returned to his country Bamana, she didn’t know she was pregnant with me. They never saw each other again.” Why didn’t she write? She didn’t have an address. Why didn’t he write? How would she know? Why didn’t she go to Bamana? ‘I couldn’t afford it,’ she would say. ‘We can barely afford to go to Blackpool.’ What was he like?” ‘I don’t know, Anna. It was so long ago. He was only here for a few months.’ Her answers never changed. There was nothing more to tell. I didn’t even know what he looked like.” By the time I was eighteen, I’d stopped trying to find out about him. Although, once in a while, I would daydream about travelling to Bamana, stopping strangers in the street and asking if they knew a Francis Aggrey. I don’t remember when that dream died.” Excerpt from “Sankofa” by Chibundu Onuzo. Continue reading here: opencountrymag.com/sankofa-b…