Interview with Sheila Heti

The following is an interview with Sheila Heti, author of the short story collection, The Middle Stories, and the recently published novel, Ticknor.  More can be learned about Sheila at http://www.sheilaheti.net/.

Dan:

Hello Sheila, thank you for taking some time from your schedule to answer some questions.

Sheila:

You're welcome. What schedule?

Dan:

You were born in Toronto.  Might as well open with a huge stereotype – how big a Leafs fan are you?

Sheila:

I actually don't follow hockey. I like other clichés about Toronto, though, like the CN Tower.

Dan:

You studied both Art History and Philosophy at the University of Toronto.  How do you think those studies have wandered into your writing?

Sheila:

In every way. They are the basis of what I find interesting about writing, the way that it's part of a continuum of art-making, that it asks questions about what is the world, where one can find value in life, what are the materials that make up existence. I am less interested in story than other people seem to be; stories make me impatient on principle. What I like about writing is that it is reveals a system of thought; this is true of philosophy, obviously, but paintings also reveal their systems in a terrifically immediate
way.

Dan:

Is an MFA not something available at the University of Toronto?  Or were you not interested in being taught writing?

Sheila:

It's probably offered, but it just never appealed to me, going to school to write; it always seemed like something you had to learn on your own – like having sex, I wouldn't go to school for that either. You do it until you figure it out, and the figuring it out is part of the fun. It should be natural, not institutional. Besides, for me, the essential joy of making art is that it has nothing to do with anyone else.

Dan:

You then studied playwriting at the National Theatre School. Were you already writing fiction at that time?

Sheila:

Yes. I applied to the school because I had just come from two months of working on a grant application, and when I was finished, my life felt empty; I rashly decided to begin another application. Theatre School was the first thing that came to mind, but I hadn't dreamed of going. The most memorable class in school was called Perfect Scene. We came in the second day with a scene, and spent the rest of the year trying to make it Perfect. This is a totally insane idea, because the perfection a scene makes no sense outside the context of a play.

Dan:

I understand that you divide time between Montreal and Toronto.  What leads you to Montreal on such a regular basis?

Sheila:

I like leaving home and returning home, but mostly I like living in Toronto. Though it is not the cultural centre of the world, I cannot imagine a finer place to live, in part because of this. Montreal is a great city, too. It has cheap rent, people hanging out all day doing nothing, a beautiful mountain, and I like speaking French. When I was there for Theatre School, it during the referendum on whether Quebec should leave Canada, and people had spray-painted men with bayonettes on the sidewalks. I think there's a part of me that feels like I have to get in as much Montreal as I can before the barricades.

Dan:

Your first book, the story collection, The Middle Stories, was first published in Canada, by House of Anansi.  When it came out later in the United States, published by McSweeney's, the sets of stories were not identical.  What was the reason for this?  I'm assuming it wasn't an elimination of stories so Canadian in nature that Americans wouldn't find any interest in them.

Sheila:

Actually, it was early 2002 and the editor of McSweeney's thought the tone of the original collection wouldn't be appropriate for an American public in the wake of 9/11. It will not be well-received, he said; the country is in no mood. So some of the stories were cut. I was really upset about this, but in the end, leaving out some of the stories was a compromise I chose to make in order to have the collection published in the States at all. Ultimately I am grateful to McSweeney's; no one else wanted the book, and they also published my stories in their journal at a time when nobody else did (which was the whole reason I sent my stories to them; they claimed to be publishing what other mags were not). Still, if someone wants to buy the book, they should get the Canadian hardcover edition, which is truer to my intention.

Dan:

What was it like publishing with McSweeney's?  How about compared to House of Anansi – what differences were there in the two publishing experiences?

Sheila:

There was no similarity between the two houses. McSweeney's was going through a transition and it was a deeply chaotic experience for me, and for the people working there. The McSweeney's contract is an interesting piece of writing, by the way. The signing author promises to deliver "a very good book." Most publishing contracts do not specify how good the book should be, or even that it should be good at all.

Dan:

More recently, you've published your first novel.  It arrived last year in Canada, again with House of Anansi, and in March 2006 in the United States, published by FSG.  Do you now consider yourself more interested in writing novels, or are short stories still part of what you want to work on?

Sheila:

I always think of it as writing books, not stories or novels. I hate the word novelist – it has the ring of Sunday Painter to me. A book, on the other hand, is something I can get behind. A bound physical object filled with words is the essence – not plot, not character. I can't get excited about publishing in a magazine either. It's too promiscuous a form; you don't feel alone with a story from a magazine. It's like TV – you know lots of other people are experiencing it at the same time. This is good for TV, but not pleasant with fiction. It's the same trouble with bestsellers. I don't doubt their quality, but I'm not into sloppy seconds.

Dan:

How large is the readership in Canada of literary fiction?  What sort of sales numbers constitute a number publishers and authors get excited about?

Sheila:

Canadians read a lot of literary fiction. They love books by Canadian authors, which is good for a Canadian writer on a sales level, but frustrating when you find that your book tends to be thought of in relation to other Canadian books – not only by readers, but also by many book reviewers. For me and those of my peers whose primarily influences aren't Canadian, this can be frustrating. But we're a well-educated population, which is good, and I feel like things may be changing. I don't know much about sales figures. Our country's is one-tenth the size of yours, population-wise. Does that help?

Dan:

Your work has been published in German, French, Spanish and Dutch as well.  Do you have the various copies of your work? Which language were you most excited to hear that your work would be being published in?

Sheila:

When I received the Dutch edition of The Middle Stories, my friend Misha Glouberman took the book from my hands and started reading it out loud, and though he doesn't speak the language, he was able to do a really convincing rendition of it, quickly and naturally, and it was amazing to me that the sentences actually sounded like my sentences, though the words and presumably even the grammar were different. It felt like flying across the ocean for the first time and landing in England and looking up and seeing that their clouds look the same as the clouds back home. I like the singularity of the world. It always surprises me.

Dan:

Ticknor is not a very long work.  Were you at all concerned that it might be difficult to get it published at that length?

Sheila:

No, but I hate the prejudice against short books. Not everything can be made bigger without spoiling it.

Dan:

What led to your writing Ticknor?  Do you have much interest in biographies in general?

Sheila:

I have no big interest in biographies these days, though I used to buy them more often, but then I realised that the only reason I was reading them was to compare myself and my life unfavourably against the subject of the book. That's when I decided to put them aside, just until I was more stable. But they're kind of phony shams. I think physics tells us more about human life than biographies.

Dan:

Trampoline Hall. You are the creator of this lecture series, where people speak on subjects outside their expertise.  How did you come up with the idea, and how difficult is it to get people to do such speaking?

Sheila:

We started in late 2001. I was inspired by a Ben Katchor lecture I saw, and it's from a Ben Katchor comic that Trampoline Hall takes its name. He was lecturing at the University of Calgary and doing this brilliant thing with slides and pretending that we were all gathered at night, when it was actually day, and he maintained a kind of fictional relationship to us the entire time. The audience was made up of bored seventeen year olds snapping their gum, and my heart was racing. It was among the best theatre I'd seen, this disconnect between what Katchor was doing and how the audience was responding, and it got me to thinking about lectures as a form, and then about how personality reveals itself despite our attempts to perform. I felt Trampoline Hall would work best if people who were reluctant about speaking lectured, so the difficulty of getting people to talk is
built into the model of it.

Dan:

Lastly, if you were a character in "Fahrenheit 451," what work(s) would you memorize for posterity?

Sheila:

I don't have a very good memory. And maybe if all of literature is going to be wiped out, it's better that it be all, not just have one or two books remain. Probably better that we start fresh than with the prejudices of a couple of geniuses.

Dan:

Thanks again Sheila, for taking the time to respond to the questions and let the readers get to know you a little better.

Sheila:

And thanks for this giving me this opportunity to know the readers better, too.

Comments

[Sam]

>I can't get excited about publishing in a
>magazine either. It's too promiscuous a
>form; you don't feel alone with a story
>from a magazine. It's like TV – you know
>lots of other people are experiencing it
>at the same time. This is good for TV, but
>not pleasant with fiction.

Reminds me of something Aleksandar Hemon said when I saw him read a while ago:

"I like being published in magazines. I like the fact that people read it everywhere simultaneously. A book is a more intimate thing. A book is its own context, but a magazine has poetry, reviews, etc. I like that."
http://goldenrulejones.com/?p=500

[Laird Hunt]

"For me and those of my peers whose primarily influences aren't Canadian..."

I'd be very curious to know what some of those influences are -- French? American? Eastern European? Russian? There seems to be a lot at play in Ticknor in particular and your work in general...

[Sam]

I'd love to hear this answer too! Laird, I will point out that there are two pieces on Heti's website by other authors, both of which relate to Ticknor in interesting ways. One is a story Leonard Michaels called "Cryptology," and the other is a short play by Ferenc Molnar ("The Gray Fedora"). I thought it was great to see an author to point to works by other writers they admire, and just to have a little hint into that author's influences.

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