By Tyler Ayres
Teju Cole is a polymathic patterner who seems to do a bit of everything. Photographer, writer, art historian, cultural critic, and Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard University, Cole won the 2012 PEN/Hemingway Award for his debut novel Open City and is the recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His photography has been exhibited widely and his writing translated into twenty languages. If you look carefully, you can even listen to his playlists online.
Rather than plot and drama, Cole relies on pattern, texture, and symbol to provide the motive force in his writing. His curated sequences of action and reflection can appear commonplace when viewed alone, but stitched together and taken in toto, they pull essential human qualities into focus—membership, isolation, love, fear, and purpose. In his novels, readers feel the reciprocity between people and place, the ways that urban and wild landscapes shape and are shaped by consciousness.
On March 30, 2026, Cole was honored as the Melanie Brown Lecturer at Chatham University and offered a craft lecture and a public reading, co-sponsored by Carnegie Mellon University. Before the events, Cole sat for this conversation with me on the top floor of Lindsay House, the home of Chatham’s MFA program and The Fourth River. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed having it.
Tyler Ayres: I want to start on kind of a meta note. What’s your favorite part about giving an interview? What do they allow for?
Teju Cole: I like reading interviews; they can provide insight into how a writer thinks outside of their own finished work, because an interview is a form of improvisation. They’re definitely something I take seriously and like to show up for, but they aren’t something I enjoy.
TA: No?
TC: No, and I’m trying to figure out why that is. There was a time when I enjoyed them more. But having done very many of them, the question of what makes a good interview becomes ever more pressurized—I’m in such doubt about my own words and my improvisation.
TA: Right, and the words are enshrined forever. “You’re saying this thing now, but eight years ago you said...”
TC: There you go. But it’s not so much that contradiction that bothers me. That’s just a part of life. “Oh, I said this thing, okay fine, now I’m saying this other thing.” I think it’s just more a generalized uncertainty about talk.
TA: What have you been reading lately? Anything you’re looking forward to?
TC: There’s a young photographer I know who’s going to make a first book of photography. Her name is Dawn Kim, and I think something very interesting is going on with her work. And there’s a Danish author Olga Ravn who had a book out called The Employees. She seems to have a real eye for what otherness can be, in a way that seems to speak to the moment. But I’m not necessarily lining up to find the new-new.
For a lot of my life I’ve been very interested in people’s late work, when they’re past their maturity and they’re doing that Strange Old Work Thing—late Billie Holiday when her voice is already broken, late Beethoven when it gets really weird, late Schubert, he’s only 31 years old but he’s going to die next year and the work gets to this incredible intensity.
But in the past couple of years—all those examples are music but it’s fine—I’ve gotten quite interested in people’s early work, across the arts. What does that feel like, in that first flush of creativity? In the early work, you can see how they’re indebted to the people they’ve learned from, before they fully enter their own mastery. But even though early work can be a little bit dependent or even derivative, it can also be very energetic.
You know, a person’s first book is, like, everything they’ve been accumulating for fifteen years. And then the second book is the one they have to push out three years later, and it’s seldom as deep as that first one, where it’s all coming out, because this is maybe the only book they’ll do.
TA: Reminds me of Maroon 5’s album Songs About Jane, which is incredible, and all their other albums just aren’t. The first album effect.
TC: Exactly. So that earliness as a thing is quite interesting, especially if it’s somebody who goes on to make a major contribution. It means that the talent and the gift is there, and in early work, we get to see it when it’s really fresh, sort of thumbing its nose at the market.
TA: The work of different seasons of productivity. What winter work feels like versus spring work.
TC: That’s it. I learned too late to credit spring, you know.
TA: You are now, right? I don’t know. Too late?
TC: It’s not too late. A little bit late. When I was in the spring of my life, it was just all about fall and winter, but especially winter—when it’s starting to break apart, you know? But when somebody’s in their twenties and they’re doing something amazing, it’s like “wow, okay.” Not because it’s new, but because it’s fresh.
TA: Right, and vigorous. That puppy energy.
TC: Yes, vigor. Vigor mixed with mastery, and all before too many eyes have been on it, have altered it and made it awkward.
So, my favorite part of an interview is when I’ve gotten past the first part where I’m wondering how this is going to go, and suddenly we’re having a conversation and interesting things are happening. That’s the part I like.
TA: Well, I do have book questions. I hope that doesn’t break the spell of spring we’ve been casting.
TC: No, no. We’re in the spring of the interview now. We’re good.
TA: So in Tremor, one of the narrators says “what looks like control is dangerous, and what looks like giving up control can be where you are most powerful.” I’m curious when that came to you, how you’ve applied that to your life, maybe professionally, maybe personally or interpersonally. Surrendering control as a place of power.
TC: So I think the first thing I’ll say is that these are fictional personae, right? And while the line you quoted does seem intelligible as a piece of wisdom, the opposite could also be true.
This is the way characters move in novels. They could also say “losing control is very risky, that’s how people die young.” And then you’d be like, “okay, yeah, I agree with that too.” Do you know what I mean?
But let’s stay with this earlier version. I wouldn’t say I necessarily take this as a mantra, but being alive to dichotomies is one of the ways to envision what flourishing could look like. To not be rigid or doctrinaire. Actually, it’s both. It’s control and not being in control. In that sense, it’s classical and it’s jazz.
I know classical musicians, and they’re very, very nervous if anybody asks them to improvise. That’s just not what they do. They can interpret, they can put feeling into something, but don’t ask them to play a note that’s not written. And then there are the jazz people who are swinging and improvising and they have the structure, but if you ask them to play something strictly as written, they feel it’s withered and dead.
Which is better? Well, that’s the wrong question. One has a very high degree of control and the other has a very high degree of expertise that allows for control to be loosened. Embracing that dichotomy is the part that interests me.
TA: But that’s an interesting thing that you flirt with in your fiction—since there are aspects of the characters that are from your life, maybe the readers do some conflating, like, “oh, that is a piece of wisdom that Teju Cole believes is truth.”
TC: That’s right.
TA: So—and I don’t want to use the word “invite”—you do almost open the door to that type of reading.
TC: Yeah, fiction is an interesting thing. I don’t know why people do it. It is this dangerous game. It’s a strange thing because it is inviting those readings, but those readings are wrong.
Somebody was asking me about auto-fiction, which is not the most interesting question to ask. It’s a label. And it seems pretty clear to me that Open City is not auto-fiction. Tremor actually has more auto-fictional elements to it.
For me, what characterizes auto-fiction is not where somebody’s living or what streets they’re on, but what their thoughts are and what their thoughts lead to. So with Julius in Open City, that’s an invented character who happens to be my age and lives in New York City. With Tunde in Tremor, that’s an invented character whose life circumstances are different from mine but whose thoughts, at least as of that writing, are similar to mine. That’s closer to auto-fiction for me.
When somebody declares that something is auto-fictional, what kind of declaration do they think they’ve made? What’s the illumination there? Does it tell you that this is biographical? No, it doesn’t, because there’s still the fiction part, so you don’t even know what part is made up. So none of it is reliable as testimony. All you have is some inkling about the starting point.
It’s like the difference between a song somebody composed this morning out of ideas they’ve been picking up and improvising with, or a song that’s based on a piece of folk music. Okay. Now what do you know? It still doesn’t tell you anything about what has been done with that original material. All you have is a vague starting point. And I defy you to tell the difference, when you’re listening to music, whether this is something the composer came up with or something she borrowed from folk song or from bird song or from whatever.
TA: It gets me interested in why people insist on asking the question in the first place. What do they hope to accomplish with that categorizing?
TC: Genre is very satisfying. Make a genre determination, and then you know where to file something. It’s not interesting, but it’s satisfying to people to think they’ve identified something correctly, when in fact, they’ve gone in with a misidentified category in their head, and now what the thing is actually doing is opaque to them.
TA: I want to ask about Every Day is for the Thief. I believe it first came out as blog posts. Is that right?
TC: Yeah.
TA: I’m curious about your image of yourself not just as a writer, but as somebody who makes books for the world. Between the publishing of Every Day is for the Thief and Open City, did you have this actualized image of yourself as an author in your head?
TC: Yeah. So Every Day is for the Thief was published online in January 2006. And let me make a fine distinction here between “it came out as blog posts” and “it was published online.” It might have been a blogging platform, but that doesn’t matter.
What matters is that on January 1, 2006, I began to work on a project that I knew would have 30 chapters. I knew I would post a chapter a day. And I knew that at the end of those 30 days, I would expunge it from the internet. It wasn’t written ahead of time. It was written each day, eight hours a day, for 30 or 31 days. I would write all morning, edit all afternoon, post in the evening, about a thousand words. You see how that’s different from blogging? So I already had a very strong sense of authorship.
By the time I was like fifteen posts in, word had gotten around and people were reading regularly. And Nigerians were reading it. So it had a readership, but the pace, the intensity, wasn’t sustainable. I could do about a month, but then I needed to take a shower and sleep and eat a proper meal. It was definitely the most intense writing I’ve ever done in my life, 20 years ago now.
A few months later, I actually had two offers from Nigerian publishers to publish it as a book, but that wasn’t the original purpose. You had to be there—it was really an intentional experiment, and I didn’t have an ego investment in it. I did it, I knew it was good, but it didn’t need to be seen again. Finally, one of the publishers, Cassava Republic Press, persuaded me that we’d do it right, that it would be read by Nigerians, that it should have a posterity. And so I relented, and Every Day is for the Thief came out in 2007. And a few months before it came out, in late 2006, I had started work on Open City.
So I ended up becoming a maker of books over the past couple of decades, but it’s not something I was very tangled up with in terms of a burning ambition for myself. What I see myself as is a writer and an image maker with a meticulous cast of mind. And then whether that is with Random House or whether it’s mimeographed and given to friends... I won’t say it’s completely irrelevant, but it’s not really at the center of what matters.
I’m working on a couple of things right now. I won’t talk about them, but I don’t imagine either of them is for a major press because that’s not really the priority. Am I making it the way I need to make it? That question has been with me from the get-go. Why would someone make a piece of art that’s jumping through someone else’s hoops? I don’t understand that.
TA: I was going to say that your ethos is very punk rock. I mean, I heard another interview where you discuss the word “novel.” Where did that word come from? And now why are we replicating these cookie cutter works of the same shape and arc? Often, there’s nothing novel about the novel anymore. That’s totally punk.
TC: Punk rock is good. Absolutely. And maybe this takes us back to the early work energy. But part of what connected me to late work was that energy, was that breaking of form. Again, let’s not try to pigeonhole anything, because form is great, breaking form is wonderful. Intentionality is all that counts. What are you doing and why? What are you bringing to it? The work can be very loud and very snarling, but if it has that deep intentionality, then it’s as delicate as a ballad.
TA: There’s a specific symbol that I saw recurring in Open City, which was a bunch of men sitting alone. In your work, you curate these sets of symbols and place them next to each other. And this is what I love about your writing, the way it’s driven by interactions between these symbols. But I want to focus on that one in particular, these men sitting alone as this ultimate emblem of isolation.
TC: I won’t over-interpret anything in particular, because I respect the thing that critics do and they’re entitled to their reading of the work. But I will say that pattern interests me more than plot. Again, there’s control there, but it’s not driven by plot. I think my work is driven by language and by pattern. I try to have the language be very, very precise. And then what is pattern? Pattern is a recurrence of shapes, right? And it’s through this web of repetitions or near-repetitions or slant rhymes that we start to get the sense that any given book is its own world. You know, the first time it showed up it did this, then the second time it showed up it did this other thing.
That particular image of men sitting alone... I don’t know. I mean I think anybody’s interpretation is as valid as anyone else’s. But for sure, I’m interested in the way straight people navigate queer spaces, or fail to recognize them. There’s a kind of solipsism of straightness, right?
TA: Toward the beginning of Open City, we see Julius wandering New York City, mainly just observing. Neighborhoods blur into different shapes and colors, and each acquires its own distinct feeling. Reading the book starts to take on that same form—watching Julius feel and move through space is like running your hand over a quilt with its different textures. And now I know his character better than I would had I watched him navigate some dramatic plot. The texture and timbre of his moods, stitched together, are what pushes the novel forward. I guess I just want to say how fucking impressed I am by that. It’s a little strange. It’s definitely novel.
TC: Oh, thank you very much. Some of my favorite New York City writing is from people who have a way of embracing the multiplicity and who do it with a sense of wonder. Maybe the two biggest that come to mind might be Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” which is this outpouring of “there’s a this and a that and I see you and I see you and I love you and I love you.”
And then also, that 9/11 moment, which is kind of like the energetic reference point for Open City, is characterized by—and it doesn’t show up in the novel but for me it’s the background hum—the hip hop that came out of New York around the year 2000. Namely, Wu-Tang Clan, there’s Lauryn Hill’s impeccable album Miseducation, a duo called Black Star—Mos Def and Talib Kweli—and then Mos Def’s solo album a couple of years later called Black on Both Sides. Those albums are very ode-to-the-city-focused.
And there are particular lines where I am aware of doing—and you wouldn’t think of it in a heady book like Open City—but I’m doing intentional imitatio of lines from the eponymous album Black Star. Mos Def says, “the tall grass, the low plains, the mountainous ridges, thickets among the forests, rivers beneath the bridges.” Whitman does this list-making all the time, right? It’s a way of giving yourself over to the multifariousness.
TA: And the patterns that you create, what they feel like in sequence, and what that then evokes. It’s very distinctive.
TC: That’s right. So that when I say each neighborhood in the city seemed to be made of a different substance and I go into that lyric passage, I was thinking of Mos Def and Whitman.
TA: I want to talk about the title of Open City—I love catching where the title comes from in books like these. This one is on page 97 of the 2012 Random House trade paperback edition, when Julius is in Brussels and observes that only reason the city wasn’t destroyed was because they opened it to the Nazis. In the next ten or twenty pages, Julius finds meaningful friendship, even fleeting romance on the street—that’s a different kind of open city now. So you have these two symbols working side by side, two different kinds of welcome. What inspired that decision?
TC: When I’m doing a title, I want the emotional register to be permeable. That for me is what makes a good title. In Open City, there’s calm and safety, but there’s also something unsettled, uneasy. I’m often looking for something that does both.
TA: Something similar shows up in the book’s opening and closing, too. Open City starts with a lovely amble through the city, with migratory birds flying overhead. At the end, the birds are back, but this time they’re dying, whacking themselves against the Statue of Liberty. Can you talk about the decision to bookend with that tension?
TC: I don’t know that I have a clear spontaneous answer to that. I will say that I built in several false endings. So for me, this was just about composition, about the intricacy of this story beginning in medias res, with three soft endings.
TA: What is the most important habit to your writing practice?
TC: I’ll say that writing is a tool for getting certain things done. You write something, then it’s there as this delayed emotional payload. I think of a book that somebody published in 1984 and I’m getting moved by it in 2026. That’s just the way writing works. Writing does that ten times a day, it doesn’t care. So it’s worth doing it well.
However, I have a friend who is very old. When I say very old, I mean she is in her late nineties. She isn’t an artist, she isn’t a writer, she isn’t a known person. She’s just lived her life. She has a daughter in her late sixties who lives in a group home, who has a severe developmental disability. And almost every time I’m with my friend, her daughter will call. My friend will pick up the phone and say, “Hey sweetheart. Yeah, okay. I’m hanging out with Teju right now. I’ll call you back as soon as I can.” But other times, she’ll take the call and just talk to her daughter, care for her for a minute or two. And there is such tenderness, such delicacy in that availability. The most important habit I have as a writer is to try and remember that.
What do I mean by that? What I mean is that being a writer is not what’s important. Living in a way that is rooted in some kind of radical compassion, clearly that’s what matters. And paying attention to the examples that come before you of that compassion, that also matters. So it’s about cultivating attention toward the things in the world that are like that, and then creating the space in your work where they can show up.
One of the ancient Greeks said “we become what we contemplate,” and I contemplate my friend’s kindness a lot. Because when she dies, what will have survived her in this world? Every act of kindness. That’s her shelf of books. And then some of us get to actually put books out into the world. So somehow she reminds me as strongly as great literature reminds me of what kind of work it is that we’re trying to do here. We cannot afford to be confused. We cannot afford to be careerist. We cannot afford to think it’s about money or praise or competition. She just picks the phone up and she talks to her daughter. That registers as something really, really crucial to me.
For source material, Tyler has been a machinist, an English instructor, a fine dining waiter, an intelligence operator, a café musician, a freelance editor, a farm hand, a Mandarin translator, a forklift driver, a yoga teacher, and a knife peddler, among others. Check out more of his writing at www.tylerwrites.com.