Kindred Conversations: with Hilary Nichols

Story and Photos By Hilary Nichols

David Magumba

David Magumba is a Singer-Songwriter, U-M Graduate, and an opera vocalist.

Where does music begin? When you’re a musician, the search is inward. David Magumba realized that, “Beyond inspiration, you do the work. You make it happen. As a songwriter, that is the effort I am making right now.” 

When Magumba writes a piece, he sees the science of it. “I line up as many of the parameters as I can before I dive in—How do I want the lyrics to hit, the melodies to harmonize, and what instruments and why?—until the voice of the piece begins to emerge.”  With a temperament for detail work, he is suited for the long hours alone, crafting a song into being. The devotion is worth it. It is undeniable. Music is his world.

Magumba has been told, “you have a gift,” ever since he was small. He was advanced to primary in the church choir by age six at his Catholic school in Price Hill, near Cincinnati, Ohio. The area was tough, but his parents, having escaped Ida Amin’s Uganda, found each other there, and the church became their safe haven. He followed his sisters into the choir, “‘cause that’s what the cool kids did.” The first time he opened his mouth and started singing, he found the response was bizarre. All he knew was that he was making people happy. He knows he was lucky to find music. Quickly, he became a professional, singing at weddings and funerals as early as first grade. 

He entered the Vocal Performance major at the University of Michigan school of Theater and Dance after some false starts. Originally, he entered college in the business management department at Michigan State, which “didn’t work out at all.” It was a job at Zingerman’s that brought him to Ann Arbor where he enrolled initially at WCC. Still not it. The aha moment came with a realization that he should audition for the opera department at U-M, in order to fully develop his singing voice, which would take more training, which would take more funding. Once he auditioned, the school agreed, he was meant for the program, and did provide some support, though he paid his own way through most of his college career.

But that doesn’t mean this career comes easily. Being a professional musician can be slow, methodical, and agonizing work. “I want to put my message in the best light that I can.” To get the work out of his head, Magumba has had to learn to share the process. From the Amazin’ Blue Acapella group, and theater and music writing workshops, he has finally found his home and family of fellow creatives. By creating this microcosm to collaborate with, the creation begins to flourish—it grows and takes on a life of its own. “It enlightens me to dig deeper and to be able to evaluate how I actually want to say what I mean in different ways. With these respected reflections the work is honed until it really hums,” Magumba muses. 

He and I are sitting at Black Diesel Coffee House on a Tuesday morning, when he shares his performance schedule. He is keeping busy as an artist these days. He completed his roles in Dead Man Walking (U of M),  La Boheme with the Detroit Opera House, Smokey Joe’s Cafe with the Encore Musical Theater, and contributed to recordings with Emma McDermott and Hannah Baiardi, and S.N.O.T. chamber orchestra, (youtube.com/watch?v=Nj2rmvXYM-U) all while continuing to pursue his solo career. 

So, it was at his standing Tuesday night gig at the Ypsilanti Cocktail Club where I first hear Magumba’s voice. Even before we open the heavy doors and step into the stylish new club, I am struck by the strength of his tenor tone. He sits unassumingly behind his keyboard and fills the room with the contained power of a beautifully trained voice. Both effortless and all-enveloping, the elegant sound captivates the room. The audience, made up of many of Magumba’s friends from the music department, hangs on every word. The support is palpable, but he doesn’t take that for granted. Though his goal will take him to another city someday, he designs that his “goal in Ann Arbor is to build my army of support to collaborate with.” When the set ends, the microphone is unexpectedly, yet quickly, reattached to a karaoke set up and everyone steps up to join Magumba in a duet. With so much talent in this room, it is clear, Magumba’s army is fully formed and unstoppable. And for now, we are lucky that his love of music remains local before his undeniable talent takes him to a bigger stage. 

Alexander Weinstein

Alexander Weinstein is the author of Children of the New World and Universal Love.

Our way of being, our common sense and social norms, the way we dream and scheme in sequence are all from story. This source, from our fables and fairytales read while tucked into bed, becomes our common thread. Much of the mythos that unifies a culture comes from a book, written by a writer, before it creeps into our shared psyche to become the substructure of society. We owe our very way of being to a writer. But where did the writers summon the stuff to scribe these sacred texts that we now trust to be our veritable lifeblood? 

For Alexander Weinstein, the visions that fill his pages come through the heart. The characters aren’t recycled through a telescope to retell the details of our earthly life. These visitors enter through a portal from another realm. With his deft craft he makes them a home here, so that we can all meet the face of fantasy like a new friend or family member.

Each story opens us to his unique world within a few words and we are swiftly enveloped into this new truth. It is in this cajoled familiarity that these characters can do their important work of influencing our perspectives effectively. Through the singular mind of the maker, all of our imaginations are made greater. Weinstein does not take that responsibility lightly. He shared, “I find the spiritual in my present work is in the hearts of my characters, and in the aim of transcendence that underlines the characters and the plots of the stories.”

After years of deep work, studying with the Tepehuán of the Sinaloa region of Mexico, and traveling with the Huichol Indians to their sacred Wirikuta, birthplace of their Gods, alongside his more current pursuits in Lakota ceremonies and loving kindness Buddhist practices, Weinstein delves the depths of consciousness to populate his landscapes. This time of introspection has clearly been precious work to meet the many wild wonderings. His theory might seem far out, but he posits that a writer must spend the time in the quiet groves and fairy forests listening “in hopes that the unseen might decide to enchant and whisper tales of the sacred into the storyteller’s slumbering ear.” Some stories are made up and others are a gift from the “shared consciousness from an unseen world.”

Weinstein has been listening for a long time. He has been writing since third grade. Handwriting reams of pages with his first drafts, before the countless hours spent honing that brilliant initial blast, through the miasma of doubts and drudgery until eventually it shines again, with that initial sense of assuredness.

Now a full professor of Creative Writing at Siena Heights University, and the founding director of the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, Weinstein is a youthful spirit, handsome in his middle years with a well-earned gravitas. He has been living in Ann Arbor for 12 years, in a current cabin-styled home with his new wife and their blended family for a few years. I joined him there on the back porch, at the last house on a dead end, not far from downtown. The yard is surrounded by wild woods, with a slope that leads to a small swimming lake. Spending time in this nature is now a big part of the spiritual practice that fuels his fiction.  

His first short story collection, Children of the New World, was named notable literature by NPR, NY Times, and Electric Literature. He is a recipient of the Sustainable Arts Foundation Award and Pushcart Prize, as well as appearing in Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, and Best American Experimental Writing. Most notably, his short story, After Yang, was made into a film starring Colin Ferrell and Jodi Turner-Smith, now playing on Showtime. The director, renowned Korean filmmaker Kogonada, came to visit. “He sat at my table, we drank tea by the lake, and we spoke about the characters like they were real people. Then he went off and wrote the script.” The film was nominated at Cannes and won the feature film prize at Sundance Film Festival. Weinstein approved. “It was amazing to have these actors saying the lines right out of my writing. He really captured the heart of the work. It was like seeing old family members.”

The stories in his newest collection, Universal Love, summon surprising worlds in an instant. Each might seem bleak at first in this style of science fiction or, more aptly, speculative fiction, but on a deeper read the stories are filled with heart and hope. The other worldly characters encounter unfamiliar conflicts but transcend their troubled souls in the same ways we might. Cautionary tales, it could be called, and I do hope we take heed before our current trends collide with these fuzzy future tellings. “It is realism but just a little further than we are right now. 

Holographic parenting is happening. The dystopia world is mirroring my stories, in some unsettling ways it seems.”  As the author taps into the gestalt of the moment, does fiction report on or determine our reality? That is the query. I for one hope to steer away from a virtual world where our oxygen comes from tanks, and our bots struggle with addictions, too. Lately, Alexander Weinstein is exploring a more utopic vision, and with his powerful force of fiction, our future just might be bettered by his far out and outstanding imaginings. 

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