Interview with Tom Jalio Winner of BNPA2014

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Tom Jalio is a Kenyan poet, editor, runner, and winner of the BN Poetry Award 2014. You can follow him on Twitter for updates on his life @tjalio Recently, we got a chance to have a chat with him, about winning the BNPA, his writing, and his life as a runner. You can watch him read his winning poem, There Was Once Something Special Here, on http://youtu.be/OG8s5GfHQns


Lawino: Hello Tom. Let’s start this chat with you telling us about yourself.


Tom Jalio:I’m that wallflower who likes to take a backseat in social settings, and watch others audition for roles in my writings without them knowing it. I like theatres and cinemas, hiking, and running. I love to go offline, off the radar, to feed the solitude my muse craves for. Novels help me travel around the world mentally and challenge me to keep improving my writing skills. 

When not bench-warming on social media, I play for Manuscript FC as a striker of grammatical errors. I beat the offside trap of poor sentence construction, dribble past lines of repetition, win fouls against mispunctuation, red-card spelling mistakes, take penalties against inconsistency, score goals of brevity, and free-kick publishability to readers so they can have something to cheer about. In other words, I’m an editor (but would have been a footballer in another life). 

I have contributed to over ten publications since 2007, including Parents, Sunday Standard, ICT Village, The Anvil, KenyaImagine and UP Magazine. I am a columnist for the Star newspaper, writing about running and theatre,and I was featured in the 2010 Young Writers’ Project, alongside Caine Prize winner Okwiri Oduor. I have been published in the short story anthology, Nairobi Grit, and in the poetry anthology, A Thousand Voices Rising. Above it all, I won the 2014 Babishai Niwe Poetry Award.

 
I run. I started running in primary school. I twice missed out narrowly on a podium finish in high school, and thereafter I encountered professionals in town races I couldn’t compete with. But I have a growing collection of finisher’s medals and certificates, especially from the Nairobi Stanchart Marathon. The initial motivation was just to challenge myself, but I discovered a sense of serenity while at it that made it a hobby.


Lawino: So how did you get into poetry?


Tom Jalio: It’s the other way round, actually. Poetry came into my life, while I was in high school, with the malicious intention of robbing me of marks in the literature side of English exams. A piece could be ten lines long, with like twenty questions after it, and it would draw thirty different interpretations in a class of forty students. Luckily, I’d grown up reading the simple yet powerful piece, Don’t Quit, on the wall of my parents’ house. It made me aspire to connect with, not confuse, readers. I’d take plain papers from my mother’s office, write poems on them and pin them on the notice board in class. Since writing letters to girls was the in-thing at the time, I gravitated towards love poems, but it was all just literary practice on my part.


Lawino: You told us that you used to publish poetry in social media until you thought about the BN Poetry Awards.


Tom Jalio: Indeed, when I went to university, I graduated from the notice board to Facebook notes, where my love for love poems rubbed some people the wrong way. After I won the BNPA, my old classmate, Julia Wanjeri, reminisced those days via a Facebook post, saying, “For the longest time, I thought Jalio was the oddest creature. Fella lived in his own world. Walking around with scribbles on the back of his hand, donning this weird, black cap, writing words that only he could understand, ignoring the unwritten rule: you just do NOT write about love in campus. It murders a youngling’s swag.”


Lawino: She had a crash on you (Laughs). During the awards ceremony you had to perform your poem,There Was Once Something Special Here. Was that the first time you were performing before a crowd? What difference did you find between writing poetry and performing it?


Tom Jalio: Yes, that was my first poetry performance. Writing is hard because you do a lot of editing to perfect your work, but performance is spontaneous. Even if you’ve rehearsed, once a word leaves your mouth, that is it; so there’s less room for error. A brilliant piece can sound pathetic in the hands of a shy performer, but being assertive is out of character for me, so I had to try and assert myself to make others feel the value of my poem. But in the end I loved the challenge and feel it made me a better person. It lit something in me, and now I would like to write lyrics for songs, more than just write for spoken word.


Lawino: It’s been over five months now since you won the BN Poetry Awards. How has it changed your life?


Tom Jalio: I have been writing poems for about a decade now, but I never thought of it as much more than a private hobby. So winning made me acknowledge that I am indeed a poet. I have since included poetry in my feature report on the latest Stanchart Marathonand I started taking a second look at poetry ideas I had long left unattended.

 
At a personal level, it was a bit overwhelming. Suddenly, I was being pulled aside every minute for photographs, interviews, and autographs. It felt surreal. When I got back to Kenya, friends who heard of the cash prize jokingly reminded me they have M-Pesa accounts. I couldn’t log on to Facebook without finding friend requests, and my followers on Twitter overtook the number of people I followed. I feel like I should spawn lyrical magic every time I post something, yet inspiration is not an everyday thing. Then I went to Storymoja Festival and rubbed shoulders with more accomplished artists. This brought me down to earth. I felt like a donkey in a horse’s race.

 
My hectic work schedule has kept me from doing any immediate literary follow-ups, but I don’t want to be a one-hit wonder. I’m definitely going to beg, bribe, and bully my muse for more of that award-winning stuff.

 
Otherwise, when I left Uganda, after the award ceremony, it dawned on me that I had represented not just myself but my country, and so I bought patriotic attire. Among the things I admired in my brief stay in Kampala was the food I ate in Club 5 Restaurant. The meal had posho, matooke, rice, tilapia, nakati, sweet potatoes, and groundnut sauce. In Nairobi, you have to visit all the restaurants just to get half of that variety.


Lawino:Marry a Ugandan woman, and then you’ll eat that kind of food every day (Laugs). So tell us about your upcoming novel, which you say is based on your experiences as an amateur long-distance runner.


Tom Jalio: It’s called All in a Day’s Workout, and itstarted as a fictional account of my experiences in the gym. At first I intended it to be three short articles of about five hundred words each, for a daily newspaper, but the more I wrote it, the more I realized it had life as a longer piece of work. Essentially, in the book, I’m going to take myself out of my body and put a caricature that is more engaging. Someone not so fit, not so serious. I like the creative freedom that gives me, and I’m eager to venture outside my comfort zone of nonfiction. I haven’t touched it in a while due to professional distractions, but I have a twelve-chapter outline with two chapters drafted so far. I intend it to be humorous, and to counter myths and stereotypes about Kenyans in athletics. Our country is famous for running but has a shortage of literature on the subject, so as a Kenyan runner-writer, I am well-placed to fill that gap.


Lawino:Shall we see a poetry book from you as well?


Tom Jalio: Of all my attempts at topical collections, the one that has the most promise is the one from which Letter of Rejection, published in A Thousand Voices Rising, came from. At the moment, I only have one other poem in the collection, Letter of Application, but I have a list of thirteen poems inspired by that line of thinking, that is love poems in the form of letters. That might be too short for a proper book, so maybe I’ll do it as a chapbook.


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