12 or 20 (second series) questions with Michelle Syba
Michelle Syba’s
debut story collection
End Times
is out inMay from Freehand Books. Described by Meghan O’Gieblyn as full of “humanity,ferocity, and grace,” End Times is about people variously entangled withevangelical culture. It features a cast of characters that includes a hipstermegachurch pastor, a management consultant who ends up at Davos, a nurse whobelieves in faith healing, and quite a few Slavic immigrants. Michelle grewup Pentecostal and left the faith in university, becoming a zealot forliterature and completing a PhD in English at Harvard. She lives in Montreal. Youcan follow her on twitter at @lit_zealot.
1 - How didyour first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare toyour previous? How does it feel different?
I’m stillamazed that some strangers in Alberta were willing to put time and money intomy stories. They’re no longer strangers, of course, but given most publishers’reluctance to accept short-fiction collections I remain awed by the generosityand guts of Kelsey Attard, Naomi Lewis, Deborah Willis, and Colby Clair Stolson.
As far as howthe stories in End Times compare with my previous short fiction, mosthave a stronger current of plot. The titular story was the first one I wrote inwhich the plot unfolded fairly organically, in a way that surprised me and alsofelt inevitable, per Aristotle’s handy guideline.
2 - How didyou come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
I didn’t. J It has been a long, twisty route tofiction, after a period of writing academically about literature, hoping itwould scratch my creative itch, and then writing a few memoir essays. Aboveall, I came to fiction first as a reader, and my time in academia gave me the opportunityto read gobs of wonderful art.
3 - Howlong does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writinginitially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear lookingclose to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
On the wholeI’m a slow writer. I prefer some preliminary rumination, in the form of notes(often just a phrase, a bit of dialogue, an image, etc.) scribbled in mynotebook or typed into my phone. I need to feel some inner pressure ornecessity to write the story, and that pressure takes time to build. I’m totallyopen to being a faster writer, but that message has not yet been received by mysubconscious!
4 - Wheredoes a work of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short piecesthat end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a"book" from the very beginning?
In the case ofEnd Times, the titular story had a lot of energy in it. After I wroteit, I realized that I wanted to write a story about a McKinsey managementconsultant like the daughter in “End Times,” Katy. (That story became thenovella For What Shall It Profit a Man?) Then the homophobic elements in“End Times” made me want to write a story about a gay evangelical man, as akind of counterargument. Plus I wanted to write more stories about Czechimmigrants, a topic treated only glancingly in “End Times”; and then there was thesurge of the Christian Right from 2016 until 2020, and again in 2022, with theOttawa convoy protest. So there were a lot of lively little kernels in thatfirst story, enough for a book, it turned out.
5 - Arepublic readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sortof writer who enjoys doing readings?
I’ve done onlytwo readings. Each time I enjoyed it: it’s thrilling to witness people’sattention to your words, but needless to say, it’s not essential. What’s been essentialis feedback from my writing group.
6 - Do youhave any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions areyou trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the currentquestions are?
I wouldn’t saytheoretical concerns, but my work has questions and concerns, yes, absolutely.Despite having left Pentecostalism, I remain fascinated by people of faith. I’mcurious about what their faith makes possible for them, where it can take them,especially people with more precarious lives, such as immigrants and singlemothers.
During theperiod when I began to write in earnest, Trump was newly elected and the damagewrought by white evangelicals was on full display. My first feeling towards manywhite evangelicals who supported Trump was contempt, and that reactionunsettled me when it implicated people I loved. After a while my contempt grewtedious. I wanted to explore a fuller range of emotions and perceptions vis àvis evangelicals. Also, I had long felt that there were things secularpeople didn’t understand about evangelicals, and I wanted to explore some ofthose blind spots.
7 – What doyou see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they evenhave one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
It’s fair tosay that the contemporary literary writer is pretty marginal within the largerculture.
What do Ithink the writer’s role should be? I struggle with this. I don’t even know whatthe larger culture is anymore. There’s a bunch of niches, a few of which I findeither stimulating or cozy. I think literature is still useful for people whoseek out complex expressions of human life, where there is space for ambiguityand ambivalence and the emotions or thoughts that make us doubt our own certitudes.After all, reading a good story is an experience of being surprised,recognizing that you didn’t understand a character or a situation as fully as youthought you did. A story turns the experience of uncertainty, which in life weusually dislike, into a pleasure. In a story, I can be delighted by uncertaintyand the eventual apprehension of my own ignorance. In this way, literature canbe a tiny countervailing force to the snappy strong opinions of social media.
8 - Do youfind the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (orboth)?
Essential! Ican never see my words the way another reader does, so once a story is fully draftedit’s a gift to hear what another reader who cares about literature experienced asthey read my words.
9 - What isthe best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Write whatyou’d like to read.
10 – Howeasy has it been for you to move between genres (journalism to short fiction toessays to critical prose to the novel)? What do you see as the appeal?
Very! It hasbeen a relief, in fact. When writing in one genre feels stalled (say, memoir),I can always switch to another (like fiction!), which feels fresh and exciting.
11 - Whatkind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How doesa typical day (for you) begin?
When I can, I writein the morning, though first I read for 20-30 minutes. I need to be reminded ofthe thrill of literature by someone else’s example. Also, there’s always asnack, even if I’ve just eaten breakfast. I never sit at a desk, always in aneasy chair or on a couch. It’s a fairly spoiled routine.
When I beganto write creatively in earnest, I realized that I would need to make theexperience pleasurable to build the necessary endurance to finish a project.Given the failure built into the writing life (as Stephen Marche has recently arguedin his exhilarating book On Writing and Failure), the experience ofwriting has to be enough. And once you get into it, it is.
12 - Whenyour writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of abetter word) inspiration?
Books! Istarted to write creatively because it didn’t feel like ‘enough’ to be areader. My faves are fairly canonical. Munro. Flannery O’Connor. George Eliot.Woolf. Also: Bohumil Hrabal, Rachel Cusk, Yiyun Li, J. M. Coetzee, Gogol.
13 - Whatfragrance reminds you of home?
Lynda Barryhas a great piece about how bad we are at identifying the smells of our ownhomes, which to us smell like nothing much. Probably the home with the mostdistinctive smell was my childhood home, which was above my mother’shealth-food store. It had that classic ‘small health-food store’ smell—notes ofchamomile, nettle, cinnamon, glycerin, freshly-ground peanut butter, and abunch of other spices and herbs.
14 - DavidW. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other formsthat influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Nature is theclosest thing. As I get older I am consistently charmed by nature. The way Inow notice the texture of lichen on a tree or the swoop of a chickadee’s flighthas made its way into my work. During the pandemic I started foraging for mushroomson Mont Royal, and that activity oriented me towards decay and death inunexpected ways, resulting in the story “Matsutake.”
15 - Whatother writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your lifeoutside of your work?
Like manymiddle-aged people I have been drawn to meditation. Shunryu Suzuki and Pema Chödrönare the bomb!
16 - Whatwould you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Garden. Infact I’ve just started this spring, but I haven’t really ‘done’ gardening yet.I am becoming an aficionado of worms.
17 - If youcould pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately,what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I don’t know. Ifeel very absorbed by my current life.
18 - Whatmade you write, as opposed to doing something else?
As many peoplehave acknowledged, making art isn’t really a choice. It’s something I have todo to feel sane.
19 - Whatwas the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
EdithWharton’s The Age of Innocence!!! Somehow I never got around to it ingrad school. The exploration of wealthy 1870s New York life, wry but above allprecise—oh the tyranny of pleasantness!—and the way the protagonist Archer’sinner life secretly threads itself through the niceties of that world, the wayshe fools himself about what he feels, it all feels so true even now.
Filmwise, I lovedThe Farewell, its mix of pathos and hilarity; and also the way itpresents the audience with a situation they might not agree with (a family lie)but invites them to stay with it and try to understand it.
20 - Whatare you currently working on?
Recently I’vereturned to personal essays. I suspect that I have a creativesystolic/diastolic system whereby I alternate between nonfiction and fiction.We’ll see!
