"Heartbreaking, humorous, often disturbing, and always deeply human, Dionne Irving’s ten linked stories in The Islands explore the struggle of diaspora Jamaicans to find belonging and connection in their adopted communities—to find home. The stories succinctly capture the remnants of postcolonial oppression—racist, sexist, or classist—that Jamaicans encounter in their new worlds. In several of her stories the characters—mostly women—encounter moments of unsettling disconnection between themselves and the people closest to them; characters in other stories find connection with the least probable acquaintances. Irving presents her many disparate characters, even the unlikeable ones, in an intimate, lucid style that keeps the Jamaican experience vivid and personal. These stories touch us and stay with us."

Dionne Irving is originally from Toronto, Ontario. Her work has appeared in Story, Boulevard, LitHub, Missouri Review, and New Delta Review, among other journals and magazines. Her first novel Quint came out in the fall of 2021. She currently teaches in the Creative Writing Program and the Initiative on Race and Resilience at the University of Notre Dame, and lives in Indiana with her husband and son.

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What advice would you give your ten-year-old self about being human in 2023?

"People will want to hear the stories you have to tell.” I spent a long time feeling as if my stories—of the diaspora, of immigration, of people in liminal spaces—weren’t narratives that people wanted to read. How could I coax my stories out into the world if I wasn't finding others like them? It took a long time and a lot of missteps to find the courage to write what I wanted, not what I thought others wanted. I think a lot about children who are part of large, diasporic communities—like I was—who need to hear stories about their communities and their cultures—like I did—to understand the value, meaning, and importance of their experiences.

In an alternate version of the world—one in which you are not a writer—who would be you be?

I would be a chef! I continue to entertain a fantasy of going to culinary school. I love food and cooking and eating and food TV and restaurants. For a time, I taught writing at a culinary school and realized how often we underestimate the art and artistry, the dedication and training that can go into preparing a meal. In some ways, writing a story and cooking a meal come from the same place for me, each a practice of connection with other human beings through a shared experience. It strikes me that both eating and reading can be equally solitary or communal experiences, each bringing different pleasures. I believe that sharing a great book with someone can be as powerful and intimate as sharing a great meal.

If you could take a road trip with any author, living or dead, who would it be and where would you go?

I absolutely adore Zadie Smith, a devastatingly, ridiculously talented writer who somehow manages to toggle between the absurdities of life and its very real dramas. Smith masterfully manipulates her reader, forcing us to investigate the contradictions and incongruities of a world where immigration and imagined borders have long-lasting cultural consequences on the national and international stage. And she somehow does all of that while animating those forces and their effects on individual lives. All of that and I’ve said nothing about her absolutely brilliant nonfiction! Zadie Smith writes about Jay-Z with the same level of curiosity, intellectualism, and style that she writes about Martin Buber. Together, we’d tour the English countryside in an old Jaguar, and although she’d have to drive, I’d still let her pick the playlist.

The Islands is the only work of short fiction on this year’s Giller Prize shortlist. As a writer, why are you drawn to short fiction and how can short stories speak to readers in ways a novel cannot?

I’ve always loved the short story form. In story collections I perceive the possibility for a series of subtle epiphanies that wax and wane among stories, characters, and moments. I also embrace the snapshot-like potential in a short story—a manufactured candidness in a glimpse into someone’s life that, I hope, allows for a greater, broader understanding of what it means to be human. There are uncommon and magical moments—perhaps more frequently in a novel?—where a character and a reader both arrive at a pronounced realization through a moment of transcendent insight; but in my collection of stories, I think readers might understand something even when a character doesn’t, which allows me to play with dramatic irony.

What’s the last Canadian book that changed you in some way?

In some ways, it’s more resonate for me to consider the first Canadian book that changed my life. Growing up in Mississauga, I had some wonderful teachers, who understood that what I needed most was to read without interruption. I found Joy Kogawa’s Obasan in Grade 5 and was utterly transformed. Not only was Kogawa’s use of language stunningly beautiful in unfamiliar ways, but I felt transfixed by the ways the past and the present were so closely linked, and by how both point to possible and divergent futures. My young self experienced a dawning recognition of some of the massive historical systems of oppression that enshroud our world, and in response, my writerly imagination began to tease out and take up questions about where we come from and where we’re going. Obasan made me want to find (and write) more of those stories, thereby attempting to understand both Canada and myself in different and complicated ways.

Excerpt from The Islands

You will spend your entire life selling—but this is the first time. So small, you barely reach the counter. You are given a stool. You are told if you work hard, there will be a reward. You are taught to make change. You are taught to make smiles at the customers. You are taught to cut yam, to chop pigs’ feet, to take hot patties from the hotter oven. The burns and scrapes and cuts will last through adulthood, will last beyond death. Injury will always remind you of what it means to work.

On Saturday morning, the shop is clotted with people from the Islands, all there to buy oxtail, and pigs’ feet, to take packages of tripe, leaking, wrapped in heavy butcher paper—and to argue and laugh, and laugh and argue. They lean toward bags of Otaheite apples, or chocho, or tins of Milo. If only you could inhale the coming future in which these foods will become fashionable, in which this education in butchery, in food and flavor, will twenty and more years later help you appear hip and cultured—exotic, even—to lighter-skinned friends in particular. You can’t now know, but you will be the lonely one who understands how blood thickens stew, how marrow complicates flavor, how the perfect pepper in the bin needs to be found.

Forget this work? No. Never. This work defines you, contains you. Allows you. But much later, your friends somehow think you spent your early years traveling—not, in fact, in the back room of a small shop inside a strip mall, listening to the high musical Bajans remind you that Coward dog keep whole bone. Listening to the Trinis insist, Better belly buss than good food waste. And the Jamaicans, the Jamaicans, measuring out mutton with their eyes, asking, Just a toops more fi make mi belly na cry fi hunga. Floors always need sweeping, candies kept clean, not to eat. You dust shelves stocked with things you cannot imagine your white friends at school eating: guava jelly, tamarind paste, cock soup. At the shop there’s always, always a cricket match on the small portable television, and everyone complaining about the gassed bananas and eating gizzada and bun and processed cheese that comes in a tin. How can you explain this, any of it? Your history with food, with work, the way they are fastened together? The way that you love and hate the shop equally?

Your parents don’t understand the shame of Monday morning. Don’t know what it means to have fish scales on your pink Keds, or what it means that your hair smells like brown stew chicken, or that your sandwich is corned beef and salad cream between two thick slices of hard dough bread, or that a boy tells you it looks like mashed brains so you look down and chew and chew and chew. You won’t know for years that it tasted like home and that gift of the British to both plant a flag and impose a culture.

On Saturday you will hear—over and over again— It’s so good to have the whole family here. Working. Over and over again—all day—you will hear it, thinking of other girls your age in ballet classes. Sleeping in. Shopping with their mothers. Settling into Saturday-morning cartoons. And bowls of Cap’n Crunch. You sweep floors, cut dasheen, and try to read when you can, waiting for the book to be snatched from your hands. This shop is your story, your inheritance. Over and over again—as you haul ten-pound bags of basmati, stack tins of coconut milk. I’m glad you are doing it. Just like the Chinese. We need to be more like them. You will remember Oliver Twist (which you read in snatches between tasks) and the workhouse and Fagin. And you can’t imagine why someone won’t come and save you, too. But you remember that these are your real parents, that these Saturdays are your real life. That this world of shop chat, bleaching cream, boxes of dasheen, copies of The Gleaner with newsprint so smeared that you can barely read the stories, and cartons of goat milk and everything beyond it is yours and also not yours. You will always associate work with the coppery smell of animal blood and sawdust and blades that cut fish.

If you could, you’d squint and look into the future. Tell the customers—so much in love with your work, with your working—that the Chinese and everyone but them will own their Island one day. Hurt them. If you could, you would look down, fold your arms, suck your teeth, and tell them that you won’t remember them fondly. You can’t know if they will remember you with fondness either—or perhaps at all. You—the little girl, swinging with effortless precision, wielding that machete—the magic of it all. You close your eyes and the rest of you becomes the machete, too. Cutting through their dreams, as they lie in bed, their bellies full. Will they remember the sound of the blade cutting meat, cutting bone, before it thuds home on the butcher’s block? Will they remember who did the selling? Or will they only remember buying?

You will just remember the work.

Excerpted from THE ISLANDS: STORIES. Copyright © 2022 by Dionne Irving. Excerpted by permission of Catapult. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.