(Poet, Amatortisero Ede in conversation with short story writer and novelist, Sheila Heti<\/em>)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n Amatoritsero Ede: <\/b>Welcome to MTLS\u2019 interview series, Sheila. We have been meaning to have this chat for a while now. But it finally comes on the heels of your nomination for UK\u2019s prestigious Orange Prize, now renamed The Women\u2019s Prize for Fiction. It is a very auspicious moment indeed. This brings me to the Toronto Star<\/i>\u2019s commentary about the significance of your work as a writer. You are described as a representative of the \u2018now\u2019 generation. I have a sense that you don\u2019t like to wear that cap. Nevertheless, don\u2019t you think the Toronto Star<\/i> is justified; does that cap not sit even more squarely now with your being long-listed for the Women\u2019s Prize, your being on Time Magazine<\/i>\u2019s 2013 poll to select a pool of 100 \u201cleaders, artists, innovators, icons and heroes [who] are the most influential people in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n Sheila Heti:<\/b> I don’t think things written in the newspaper and award nominations have anything to do with what a book’s actual worth is. I think it takes a much longer time in culture to figure that out, so I don’t see any of these things as signs of anything.<\/p>\n A.E.: <\/b>I will wager that the Toronto Star\u2019s description of you as representative of a \u2018now\u2019 generation has to do, amongst other things, with your postmodern stylistics, the structural departures in your prose. Your most resent work, How Should a Person Be<\/i>? (2012) is unclassifiable, that is, \u201coriginal\u201d and \u201cgenre defying\u201d according to the New York Times<\/i> Book Review<\/i>. Can you elaborate on its sub-titling \u2013 \u2018a novel from life\u2019 in terms of style?<\/p>\n S.H.:<\/b> The publisher wanted us to put something on the front cover that would help readers. \u201cA novel from life\u201d came long after the book was written. I would never have chosen, without prodding, to give the book a sub-title. We played around with some ideas and that was the best we came up with. I wasn\u2019t thinking of it as \u201ca novel from life\u201d when I was writing it and I still don\u2019t think of it as \u201ca novel from life.\u201d I would be happiest if it was just called \u201ca novel\u201d or \u201ca book.\u201d Someone suggested a few months ago that \u201ca novel in<\/i> life\u201d would have been more apt than \u201cfrom<\/i> life\u201d and I liked that a lot.<\/p>\n A.E.: <\/b>From book to book \u2013 Ticknor<\/i> is notable as well as your most recent \u2013 you have consistently straddled different genres within each individual work. This makes one wonder: is it fiction, faction, historical fiction, autobiography etc. One gets a sense of that \u2018now-ness\u2019 which Toronto Star applauds. What are you trying to do \u2013 break with the past stylistically or find a unique voice?<\/p>\n S.H.:<\/b> I\u2019m just trying to write good books. I\u2019m not trying to break from the past or find a unique voice. It may seem like I\u2019m straddling genres but I\u2019m actually just not thinking about genres. I feel like genre exists for bookstores, so they can shelve things more easily for customers. I don\u2019t think there\u2019s any reason to think about genre when you\u2019re writing. Naturally if you read a lot in a lot of different areas\u2014mythology, business biographies, experimental fiction\u2014all those forms will be part of you and also a part of your work. I think there\u2019s value in all kinds of writing and you can be inspired by anything. One of my favourite books is a manual on how to write in Gregg shorthand. There\u2019s so much that\u2019s interesting in all books.<\/p>\n A.E.: <\/b>The protagonist in How Should a Person Be<\/i>? seems to be your alter ego. She has your first name, Sheila. In the same way other characters have the first names of your personal real life friends. The text is interspersed with documented interviews with friends, and actual email exchanges. Where does fiction begin and autobiography ends in that work?<\/p>\n S.H.:<\/b> It\u2019s all wrapped up together. This is actually the question I get most often about this book and it seems like when people ask it they\u2019re assuming there\u2019s a big difference between fiction and non-fiction, but when you sit down to write, they aren\u2019t so different. There\u2019s literally nothing different happening in the mind or in the hand when you\u2019re writing \u201cwhat happened\u201d vs. when you\u2019re writing \u201cfiction.\u201d It\u2019s exactly the same process. When I was writing How Should a Person Be?<\/i>, I told myself I wanted to write without using my imagination, but of course I did end up using my imagination. At no point did I think what I was doing was autobiography, and I still don\u2019t. Autobiography and memoir have very particular meanings: their motivation is to tell the world the story of your life (or about some part of your life) because you want to share it with people, and you think it\u2019s important to share, and you\u2019re trying to say what happened, and none of those things were true of the ways I was thinking when I was writing this. The Sheila character is an example of a human; what happens to her is an example of what can happen to a human. I just wanted to use materials that were close by. I was inspired by Margaux\u2019s idea that one should be resourceful, not wasteful, in the making of art. When that comes to making a painting, that might mean make small paintings, not gigantic ones. That\u2019s the kind of thinking that went into the book. What\u2019s the simplest, most resourceful way to proceed? I also used myself because I wanted to talk about how we make idols of ourselves. For lots of other reasons, but none of them autobiographically motivated. I wasn\u2019t trying to share my story with the world. S.H.:<\/b> I don\u2019t think I understand this question. First, the book is no less or more personal than any narrative I\u2019ve ever written. In terms of \u2018therapeutically negotiating reality\u2019 I don\u2019t know what that means. The book is playing with self-help deliberately. I think it would be impossible to create any work of art and not engage your \u201cself\u201d while doing it. Your self is the engine of the work.<\/p>\n A.E.: <\/b>In 2007 you interviewed Dave Hickey for The Believer. <\/i>In that conversation you maintained that, \u201cIncreasingly I\u2019m less interested in writing about fictional people, because it seems so tiresome to make up a fake person and put them through the paces of a fake story. I just \u2014 I can\u2019t do it.\u201d What is the literary-philosophical, ideological or existential rationale behind that statement?<\/p>\n S.H.:<\/b> There isn\u2019t one. I was just bored. It felt like a toy I didn\u2019t want to play with anymore.<\/p>\n A.E.: <\/b>You are Interviews Editor at The Believer<\/i> magazine. How does that preoccupation influence or affect your activity as a creative writer?<\/p>\n S.H.: <\/b>The interview format is a form I really love. I loved reading The Paris Review <\/i>interviews <\/i>when I was a teenager. I didn\u2019t know any writers and never imagined I would and was uncertain of how to proceed. Any time I went into a used bookstore I would look for Writers at Work <\/i>and I finally collected nearly all of them and I would just read these interviews to learn what it meant to be a writer and how writers worked. I was fascinated by writers and their processes, all so different from each other, yet each writer so assured in the way they, individually, <\/i>should proceed. I think I learned that confidence is more important than \u201crightness.\u201d Mainly because there is no \u201cright\u201d way to proceed. But so the interview form really stuck with me as something that can quite beautiful and really valuable. Also, editing interviews can feel a like you\u2019re writing short plays. I always wanted to be a playwright, but that didn\u2019t work out for various reasons, but editing interviews is not so radically different from playwriting. You\u2019re creating a story and a progression through time in dialogue, and it\u2019s about the revelation of the interviewer and the interviewee and about what develops between them, and there\u2019s a beginning and an end. <\/b>As to how the editing intersects with novel-writing, I don\u2019t know, except that all writing feels the same, whether you\u2019re writing a novel or editing an article or an interview. You\u2019re playing with sentences and mood and creating surprise and all these things.<\/p>\n A.E.: <\/b>Your earliest work has intimations of that stylistically unsettling air, which is enlarged in your later writing \u2013 I refer to The Middle Stories<\/i>. It is a collection of tightly drawn fables, and elicited ambivalence in some readers. Would you say that the collections\u2019 departure from the norms of storytelling (sudden beginnings, unpredictable or plotless plotting or lack of plot), despite its being in a familiar fable genre, was responsible for a certain amount of initial ambivalence in the general reader to an otherwise well-received work?<\/p>\n S.H.:<\/b> I can\u2019t say for sure. People who don\u2019t like your stuff or who are ambivalent don\u2019t usually write to tell you why. In the specific case of The Middle Stories<\/i>, when people wrote to tell me they liked it, they usually told me about how they read it, not why they liked it. A lot of people seemed to read the stories out loud to their boyfriends or girlfriends, on camping trips or in bed, before sleep. Someone sent one story a week to a friend overseas. Those are the kinds of things I hear from people about that book. Don\u2019t ask me why, but a lot of gay men seem to love the story Mermaid in a Jar. <\/i>It\u2019s just something I\u2019ve noticed.<\/p>\n A.E.: <\/b>I presume that by now the postmodern trajectory foreshadowed in Middle Stories<\/i> is very clear in How Should a person Be?<\/i>, and you won\u2019t be pigeon-holed as a writer?<\/p>\n S.H.:<\/b> I wouldn\u2019t mind being pigeon-holed if it was the right pigeonhole.<\/p>\n A.E.: <\/b>The same kind of, well, \u2018irreverence\u2019 for traditional forms or modes of thinking seems to be the fillip for your book of \u201cconversational philosophy\u201d \u2013 according to The New Yorker<\/i>. It is written in collaboration with Misha Glouberman. What inspired that essay collection?<\/p>\n S.H.: <\/b>He did. I loved the way he spoke and thought and I felt the world should have a book by him. But he\u2019s not a writer, so I had to be the writer. It seemed to me that the way he thinks is unique and valuable, and I admire his character, which is comprised of so much kindness and care. I also wanted to work with him again. We created a lecture series together in 2001\u2014Trampoline Hall\u2014but I quit the shows in 2006 and we hadn\u2019t had worked on a project together in a few years, so that was a big motivation, too. I missed making something with him.<\/p>\n A.E.: <\/b>A work by two authors makes one wonder: who wrote what percentage? What was the workload or arrangement like? <\/b><\/p>\n S.H.:<\/b> I came up with the idea for the book, then we together made a list of \u201ceverything Misha knows\u201d and we asked friends for suggestions on what the chapters could be about. Then he would come over in the morning and we\u2019d have coffee at my desk and work for a few hours. Working meant: I would choose a chapter and he would speak about whatever the subject was, and I would type as he talked. That was how we wrote the book. There wasn\u2019t much editing. We didn\u2019t use all the chapters we wrote, but the ones we used weren\u2019t too rewritten. Then I wrote an introduction. So I guess he did 100% of the work and I did 100% of the work. S.H.: They probably had different influences, but it\u2019s interesting to think about them all together like that. I think one thing they all have in common is they\u2019re all about the manipulation of reality: theatre is the manipulation of a bubble of space and time in which people are gathered together; philosophy is a manipulation of how one sees the world; and art history examines how artists manipulated their materials to express the time they were living in and something about themselves and how they saw things. I\u2019m interested in books as objects that manipulate the reality of the reader, in the ways theatre and philosophy do, or like the actor does to her self when she puts on a role.<\/p>\n A.E.: <\/b>That leads me naturally to asking you why you began Trampoline Hall<\/i>, the lecture series where non-experts talk about what they don\u2019t know much about and then take questions.<\/p>\n S.H.: <\/b>It was 2001 and I was doing a lot of publicity for The Middle Stories <\/i>that year, and I was sick of talking about myself and being on a stage and I felt too much attention had been paid to me\u2014or more than I was comfortable with, anyway\u2014so I wanted to create something that would put other<\/i> people on a stage and turn the attention on other people. I also felt upset at the over the fact that part of what it means to be in a culture is that you hear from the same voices over and over again. It\u2019s a bit less true now because of how the Internet gives everyone a voice, but it\u2019s still true. So it wasn\u2019t just about turning the attention from me, but from the newscasters, the popular actors, the columnists, everyone. Every month, three people who didn\u2019t want to be on stage and who didn\u2019t have experience with performing or who didn\u2019t have an outlet would give prepared talks, 15 minutes in length, on subjects in which they were not professionally expert, then the audience could ask questions for another 15 minutes. Misha hosted the shows.<\/p>\n A.E.: <\/b>Finally what surprises or innovation in style or vision are we to look forward in your future work?<\/p>\n S.H.:<\/b> Your question made me think of my favourite bit of dialogue from the movie Sixteen Candles<\/i>. Jake (the love interest of Samantha Baker, played by Molly Ringwald) and some jock guy are in the locker room, doing pull-ups at a bar:<\/p>\n Jake: Do you know Samantha Baker?<\/p>\n Guy: Sophomore, right?<\/p>\n Jake: Yeah, what do you think of her?<\/p>\n Guy: I don\u2019t!<\/p>\n Jake: Would you go out with her?<\/p>\n Guy: Depends on how much you paid me.<\/p>\n Jake: She\u2019s not… ugly.<\/p>\n Guy: There\u2019s nothing there, man. It\u2019s not ugly, it\u2019s just void.<\/p>\n A.E.:<\/b> Thank you very much for a fascinating conversation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I Write what I Like! (Poet, Amatortisero Ede in conversation with short story writer and novelist, Sheila Heti) Amatoritsero Ede: Welcome to MTLS\u2019 interview series, Sheila. We have been meaning to have this chat for a while now. But it finally comes on the heels of your nomination for UK\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1026,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-304","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/304\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1321,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/304\/revisions\/1321"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nA.E.: <\/b>In how far, if at all, is your intermeshing of personal narrative with a textual, created reality a kind of an engagement with self, a self-search or a means of therapeutically negotiating reality?<\/p>\n
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\nA.E.: <\/b>How is your training in philosophy, in art history and as a theatre practitioner and as an actor related to your peculiar way of doing things or seeing the world?<\/p>\n