Adeniyi Ademoroti’s Characters Are Their Own Worst Enemies

Photo by William von Herff.

When Adeniyi Ademoroti sits down to write a story, there are always two things in his head: the first sentence and the final scene. “If I don’t have anything I’m writing toward, it’s going nowhere,” he says. For him, the task of writing is filling in the gap.

Perhaps the strength of these final scenes are why Ademoroti’s stories are so cathartic. The author’s protagonists are complicated people who, more often than not, are the biggest impediments to their own happiness — an alcoholic schoolteacher who lost the will to strive for anything, a schoolboy with a repressed crush on a classmate — and watching these characters grow in subtle but important ways is one of the chief joys of reading his work. The protagonist of the novel Ademoroti is working on as a writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center this winter is no exception — he’s a closeted gay father who hates his son for being able to express his sexuality freely.

Read the full article in The Provincetown Independent here.