'A Portrait of Thinking': On the Phone with Sheila Heti

When I reach Sheila Heti in Toronto, she has recently returned from teaching a course on character at Columbia University, and is halfway through the run of her surrealist play All Our Happy Days Are Stupid staged at Videofag, a tiny theatre in Kensington Market, Toronto. Her friends make up the cast, and every night is sold out. Because her body of work is already expansive and composed of diverse, unusual projects, I ask Heti what areas she'd like to cover in this interview -- "whatever you're most curious about," she replies.

"Curious" is the word Margaux Williamson chooses to characterize Heti, in the voice-over of her experimental documentary film Teenager Hamlet, where Heti plays the role of "The Interviewer" in a Nico/Cindy Sherman-like blonde wig and big glasses. I cannot help comparing the self-made momentum and playfulness that charge Heti's art world with that of Andy Warhol's factory in New York. She admits to thinking of Warhol often and seems to share his curiosity about people. Curiosity is the constant of Heti's projects that allows for the variables: multimedia approaches for sourcing and presenting material, movement across disciplines, breaks with formal and ideological conventions.

When I reach her, she appears to be enjoying a relaxed contentment that her play and, perhaps, this period in her career are providing. Despite the fact that her writing has been translated into 12 languages (including Serbian, Vietnamese, and Danish), and has attracted rave reviews in New York and London, Heti is very much a Toronto writer, she will tell you, happiest when working with her local friends and peers. So this is where we begin.

Thea Bowering: This issue of the Capilano Review includes a number of artworks about geography and ways of locating oneself in the world, so I thought I'd start by asking you what it is that keeps you living in Toronto and how Toronto supports your writing and figures in your writing, as a real place but also an imaginary city?

Sheila Heti: Well, I've lived in Toronto more or less all of my life with short escapes to Montreal and New York, but basically it's been Toronto. Aside from How Should a Person Be? [Heti's novel], place kind of disappears in my work, like in The Middle Stories, for instance. It's as though the action happens in a studio theatre where all the walls are painted black. For me, if you're in a place for 20 or 30 years, you don't notice it anymore. It almost becomes a black or invisible backdrop. Place feels so inevitable, or so obvious. Even though as I go through my day I feel very embedded in this particular neighbourhood, in this particular city, and I love it, I didn't always. I think for 10 years, through my twenties, I was always wanting to leave and feeling: Why am I here? Why can't I get somewhere else? There were family reasons for why I was here, rational reasons, but I think there were also spiritual reasons. I have a strange certainty about being in Toronto. I feel like a tree in the soil here. The idea of transplanting myself seems kind of artificial.

TB: Reading your work I was looking for city markers. In How Should a Person Be? you mention the Toronto bar "The Communist's Daughter," and that is one of the few actual places that you name. As you said you are in the city. It's a blank-walled studio set. But it got me thinking: could you set or even write this novel in small town Canada because the anxiety around how a person should be partly comes from big city options. Performance of identity might respond to other anxieties in a smaller city or town.

SH: Yeah, I have no idea what it is to live in a small town but I imagine it's very different from living in a bigger city. There are certain Toronto markers that recur in all my work. Like streetcars. There's something about the streetcars that travel through Toronto -- they're part of the sound of the city that one has an attachment to for some reason. I always want streetcars in my work. The way they glide and that kind of gliding feeling you have in your heart when you're on them. So for me it wasn't a question of Toronto versus a small town; in my head it's always been Toronto versus a larger place like New York. I would never live in a smaller town. I don't think that I would enjoy that. I might enjoy living in the country though.

TB: I was thinking about New York a lot as I was reading your work. You say here that you're rooted in Toronto and elsewhere you say that not everyone can live in New York. This issue of the Capilano Review has a piece on Gertrude Stein and I was thinking of her book, Paris, France, where she talks about writers having two countries: the one where they physically live, and the one in which they live internally, and she talks about this second one as a romantic place, not real, but where they live really. I'm wondering if New York is your other "country"? Do you live there in an internal sense, as a writer? In your imagination?

SH: Yeah, well, it's hard not to think about New York because for me the movies of Woody Allen were a huge part of my childhood and youth and for me he portrayed a certain way of life that seemed accessible and desirable. New York meant a lot to me on a mythical level. But, living in Toronto, I would rather live in Toronto. I do live in Toronto. I appreciate that I had to discover what this city is for myself. I couldn't discover Toronto through art. I had to discover it through living.

New York is a city many people discover through art, and you have a feeling when you're quite young that the only legitimate paths you can take are the paths that other people have taken. It takes time to figure out a city that doesn't tell you how to be an artist in it. And I think Toronto is that kind of place. I mean, there are a lot of artists in Toronto, but all the people I know, at least, had to figure out what it means to be an artist here. It means something different from being in a place with a lot more money, with many more obvious social rewards, with a cultural legacy of being a place that really appreciates art. I don't think that Toronto's that sort of place. I don't think Canada is that sort of place. So it's harder to figure out. And I think it ends up being that the relationship between one's peers becomes more important. In New York, the relationship you have is also to cultural authorities, who you admire and who have a lot of power and a lot to give you. That's not the case here. I'm not somebody who wants to learn from my elders. I'd rather learn from my peers. But I think if I had grown up in a place like New York, maybe I would have more of a relationship with my elders.

In any case, to get back to your question, I don't think in my case Toronto/New York is at all a problem on the order of what Gertrude Stein is talking about. I don't live there in my imagination. I don't live in Toronto in my imagination, either. I don't really live in any particular city in my imagination. I don't care that much about cities...

This article was first published in the Capilano Review 3.22 (Winter 2014) and excerpted here with permission from the authors.

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