Iryn Tushabe: No Story Exists in a Vacuum

Iryn Tushabe is a Ugandan-Canadian writer and journalist. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Briarpatch Magazine, Adda, Prairies North, the Walrus, and on CBC Saskatchewan. Her short fiction has been published in Grain Magazine, the Carter V. Cooper Short Fiction Anthology, and the Journey Prize Stories. She won the City of Regina Writing Award in 2020 and 2024, was a finalist for the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2021, and won the 2023 Writers’ Trust McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize. She lives in Regina. Follow her on X (Twitter) and Instagram.

In this interview, Iryn discusses how her anger-fueled first draft led to a restart and ultimately to her debut novel, Everything is Fine Here, her hope for readers, and more.

Name: Iryn Tushabe
Literary agent: Carolyn Forde, Transatlantic Agency
Book title: Everything is Fine Here
Publisher: House of Anansi Press
Release date: April 22, 2025
Genre/category: Literary Fiction
Previous titles: I’ve contribute to various anthologies including, most recently, The Journey Prize Stories 33, and River in an Ocean: Essays on Translation.
Elevator pitch: Set in contemporary rural and urban Uganda, Everything is Fine Here is a bildungsroman which explores the moment when a young woman decides to assert herself outside the religious and cultural limits of her family in order to stand with her kuchu (or queer) sister and emerge—disastrously, but ultimately with renewed compassion—into adulthood.

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There’s a Ugandan proverb, “When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.” That, in a nutshell, is the situation in which Aine, the young protagonist, finds herself. She’s finally achieved the level of closeness she has always desired to have with her older sister Mbabazi, but there are societal forces pushing Mbabazi to the margins, farther out of Aine’s reach. She pushes back, but disturbing the status quo has consequences. I wanted to write this story because I hadn’t read a novel that depicted similar circumstances. I also wanted to meditate upon what happens on an individual level when a government—claiming both scientific and scriptural backing—discriminates against a group of people, perpetuating an orthodoxy that allows for those people to be called immoral, to be incarcerated, and even killed.

It took seven years before I had a draft that was good enough to show agents and publishers. The first draft of the manuscript didn’t simply record my rage; it was itself enraged, almost unreadable, and really, really, long. Rather than try to salvage parts of it, I trashed the whole thing and started again from scratch. The idea itself didn’t change, but I suppose the writing of that first draft changed me. Through it, I purged a lot of my anger and frustration and calmed down a little.

A few months after I started on the new draft, I was accepted in the Humber School for writers, in the Creative Writing graduate certificate program, with Alissa York (The Naturalist, Far Cry) as my mentor. I had met Alissa earlier that summer at the 2017 Sage Hill Writing Retreat here in Saskatchewan, so she was familiar with my project. Alissa is a writer whose work I greatly admire, and she’s a fellow nature nerd, so we were kindred spirits. She helped me reign in all that editorializing anger. Restraining myself allowed the siblings to, for want of a better phrase, be themselves. They poked fun at each other, made terrible errors in judgement, and took care of each other. Now their story felt more honest and true.

Some agents and publishers I queried thought the stakes weren’t high enough for Aine’s queer sibling, as if the threat of being severed from one’s family isn’t tragic enough. That shocked me. When I came out to my mum about my bisexuality, my biggest fear was that she’d stop loving me. Her rejection of me would have been more devastating than being attacked by a gang of homophobes, although I say that from the safety of never having endured such a physical violence. More than that, I really wanted to resist the grammar of violence I often encountered in the narratives of people living on the margins of society.

The suggestion, however subtle, that I should inflict more harm on my kuchu characters (or however else one goes about raising the stakes) felt to me like being told that writing literature that embodies beautiful and funny kuchu presences moving forward in the world is a privilege reserved for white writers in the global west, writers who have benefitted from the rights and freedoms made possible by the gay liberation movement. This didn’t sit well with me. I ranted about it to my family and friends for a good long while, even after the manuscript had found its right editor, Shirarose Wilensky at House of Anansi press.

The biggest surprise was the change in the tone of the story.  I’m a journalist by training, and perhaps that’s why that first draft had a formality to it—like a meandering editorial. Once the idea got through my head (thanks, Alissa!) that this was Aine’s story, not mine, I got out her way and she took the lead. Writing became an adventure then. I was always looking forward to spending time with these women, even Mama. I was often surprised (and shocked) by things they said and some of the choices they made.

Nearly everyone in the news-reading world knows about Uganda’s

Anti-homosexuality Act (AHA) which grew out of the 2009 “Kill the Gays” bill. This piece of legislation has shattered the lives of many kuchu folks and left relatives and friends feeling hopeless. Still, news stories and soundbites don’t convey the whole story. But fiction does this beautiful thing where it opens a window into the lives of others, allowing the reader to look inside and make up their own minds about what they see. Everything is Fine Here ends in a way that gestures toward a new beginning because no story exists in a vacuum. There are the stories that preceded it and there will be more after. Many of the stories I’ve loved understand this at their core, that life goes on beyond the word END. I hope that Everything is Fine Here sparks dialogue about what is possible for these women as they continue moving forward in the world.