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A Conversation with Miriam Toews

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“It gets under the skin and settles in”: A Conversation with Miriam Toews Natasha G. Wiebe On the warm evening of July 16, 2007, I knocked (a little nervously) on the door of Miriam Toews’s hotel room in Toronto. Miriam had fl own in from Winnipeg to teach a writers’ workshop at Humber College. Although we had e-mailed several times to set up this interview – part of my doctoral research on her writing – this would be our fi rst meeting. Miriam immediately put me at ease. She showed me to a comfortable armchair, offered me a glass of red wine (I accepted), and took up the chair next to me. For the next hour, we talked. We talked about the ways that Miriam’s Mennonite background expresses itself in her writing. We talked about how her upbringing compares to my childhood experiences in the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada. And we talked about A Complicated Kindness and how writing this story helped temper the view that Miriam – and her writer-protagonist Nomi Nickel – once had of the Mennonites. Wiebe: A few years ago, I found myself taking a course on Canadian Mennonite writers. A Complicated Kindness had just come out, so I started by reading it. It shook my world, Miriam, and it wasn’t because of its Mennonite setting; it was because of the way you described the Christian fundamentalist community. Because I was raised – my dad grew up Mennonite, but my mom didn’t – in a Pentecostal church. I always thought I was going to be a Pentecostal preacher’s wife. My husband went to Pentecostal Bible school.… Toews: Wow. Yeah. Wiebe: A Complicated Kindness was the fi rst book I’ve read that was set in a world that reminded me, in some ways, of the one that my husband and I grew up in. I was talking about the book with my husband in the car on the 104 The Conrad Grebel Review way here, and he said, yeah, she got it right.… Toews: Oh, that’s nice to hear. Wiebe: I remember when I was reading the book.… Poor guy, he was trying to read his own book or work on the computer, or whatever, and I kept running into the room every ten minutes to read him a passage, because it was so similar to what we had experienced, and I had to share it with him. It captured how that sort of atmosphere can be stifl ing, but also how there are people there who are lively and… Toews: Good. Wiebe: …authentic, and, doing the best they can. I started to write my own “mennocostal” poems in response to some of those episodes, and I was surprised to fi nd how joyful they were. I expected the poems to express some gentle criticism, but I was surprised by the joyfulness in them. Your novel is, for me, very joyful. Toews: Oh that’s very nice to hear; I appreciate that, because not a lot of people comment on that aspect of it. I like to think that it is, too, that it’s not an indictment or a criticism of the faith or of the Mennonite people, but of the fundamentalism. Wiebe: The second time I read the book was after spending some time reading some Mennonite history and some other Mennonite literature, and I found myself feeling a little bit more protective of the Mennonites. Not that your book made me feel as though I needed to be – Toews: Yeah, yeah. Wiebe: …but I could appreciate what some Mennonite readers might have seen in it that I hadn’t seen before. But, the book just rocked my world. So I am really pleased to be able to talk with you. A Conversation with Miriam Toews 105 Toews: That’s so cool. Thank you! Wiebe: Now, I should let you talk! Toews: No, no, no! I’ve been talking all day. I’m used to being by myself in a room, so it’s nice to hear you talk. Wiebe: So, I have some questions for you…. I’m interested in how your Mennonite background infl uences your writing. I’m interested in how people’s stories refl ect their culture. I’m also interested in you as a writer (a writer whose work really moves me). I’m interested in the idea of how writing can be an act of discovery... Toews: It’s true. Wiebe: ...how you can write yourself to a different understanding of your topic, or the audience you’re writing for, or the people you’re writing about, and how you can come to a new perspective of who you – the writer – are. I’m curious about the act of writing, the process of writing, and how it relates to self-awareness. That’s roughly the thread that ties all of my questions together. Toews: That’s very interesting; that’ll be good! I’ll like talking about that. Yeah, that’ll make me think... Wiebe: So having said all that, the very fi rst question I have for you seems to have nothing to do with, you know, what I just talked about for a million years. Toews: [Laughs] Wiebe: There’s a passage near the end of A Complicated Kindness where Nomi starts talking to her high school English teacher Mr. Quiring. It seems as though she’s been writing all along to him; she’s been writing her fi nal assignment for him. The book – can you see the book as her fi nal assignment 106 The Conrad Grebel Review for Mr. Quiring, her “Flight of Our People” assignment? Toews: Absolutely, yeah. Wiebe: So Nomi is a writer. Toews: Yeah, yeah. Wiebe: Why did you choose to structure the novel that way, or why do you think the novel structured itself that way? Toews: When I write, I have to be writing to somebody. I have to be writing to someone; my main character, my narrator, has to be writing to somebody. I just fi nd it easier to write that way. It just seems to make more sense in terms of the reason for writing. So in this case, I just started writing, and I didn’t know the book was going to be an assignment. I didn’t know that it was going to be directly written to Mr. Quiring until it got to a certain point. I don’t even know exactly at what point it became clear. It makes sense because he was her English teacher, and she was supposed to be writing about the topic “The Flight of Our People,” which would mean one thing from his point of view in terms of the migration of the Mennonites, but for Nomi, she takes it to a more personal end. Wiebe: So, the “Flight of Our People” for Nomi means the fl ight of her sister Tash and her mom – and her own intended fl ight – from East Village. Toews: Exactly. Yeah, the fl ight of her people, you know, very specifi cally; yeah, it’s just sort of a twist on that, on that theme. Wiebe: That reminds me of an interview you did with Hildi Froese Tiessen for Prairie Fire (2000). Toews: Okay, yeah. Wiebe: This would have been just before Swing Low came out. In the A Conversation with Miriam Toews 107 interview, you said that, unfortunately, you had negative feelings towards the Mennonite community, the Mennonite church, Mennonites in general, and you were trying to work through that, because you knew not all Mennonites were bad. Toews: Mm hmm. Wiebe: Then fi ve years later, fl ash forward, you’re sitting down with Di Brandt, and she’s interviewing you for Herizons. And you’re talking about A Complicated Kindness with her. You said there were things you really were proud of in your Mennonite heritage, and things you really liked about them, like their wacky sense of humor... Toews: Mm hmm, yeah. Wiebe: …and at the same time, there were things that drove you crazy about them. Toews: Mm hmm. Wiebe: So, in that fi ve-year period, your perspective shifted. You went from struggling with your view of the Mennonites to a more balanced view. Did writing have anything to do with that shift? Toews: Writing, certainly, and time passing. I think when I was talking to Hildi....When was that? Wiebe: 2000. Right before Swing Low was published. Toews: Back then I was very angry, because of all of the circumstances surrounding my dad’s death, his suicide, and everything that played out in the community, before and after and surrounding that. I was very angry, you know; I was very bitter. I think I in part blamed the Mennonite community and church – to a certain extent, not entirely, obviously, it wasn’t the whole picture in terms of my father’s mental illness and suicide. But certainly, that 108 The Conrad Grebel Review kind of repression, and his own guilt and the pressure that he felt to play a certain role in a community, in the church, just this very constricted life that he had that was all tied up with religious fundamentalism. And then, some of the responses from some of the people in the community in the terms of their denial of his illness and suicide, or the rumors that were spread that were not true. To a certain degree, I blamed the Mennonite community and Mennonite fundamentalism for contributing to my dad’s mental illness and death. But I think that over the years it’s imperative that you move away from anger and bitterness and blaming.
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