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Interview with Miriam Toews

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Interview with Miriam Toews Interview with Miriam Toews [00:00:09] Kendra Hello, I'm Kendra Winchester, here with Autumn Privett. And this is Reading Women, a podcast inviting you to reclaim half the bookshelf by discussing books written by or about women. And today we're talking to Miriam Toews, the author of WOMEN TALKING, which is out now from Bloomsbury. [00:00:23] Autumn You can find a complete transcript and a list of all the books mentioned in today's episode linked in our show notes. And don't forget to review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I feel like, Kendra, this interview marks off a bucket list item for you. [00:00:40] Kendra Yes. [00:00:40] Autumn Which doesn't happen often. But it does happen. [00:00:45] Kendra Yes. I fell in love hard and fast for Miriam Toews when I read ALL MY PUNY SORROWS, and then even more so with WOMEN TALKING. And so Jacqueline and I went and found all of her books in paperback in the matching Canadian editions because we're that extra. But also very much in love. And they actually are downstairs as a display talking piece in my living room. [00:01:09] Autumn And then they proceeded to double-team me into abandoning my TBR and picking this one up. [00:01:16] Kendra Yes. So we are so excited to talk to Miriam Toews today about WOMEN TALKING, which is her latest novel, which came out this past spring. It is fabulous. So Miriam Toews has written so many other novels. She's a very prolific writer. She's the author of six previous bestselling novels: ALL MY PUNY SORROWS, SUMMER OF MY AMAZING LUCK, A BOY OF GOOD BREEDING, A COMPLICATED KINDNESS, THE FLYING TROUTMANS, and IRMA VOTH—and one work of nonfiction, SWING LOW: A LIFE. She is the winner of the Governor General's Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and the Writers Trust Engle/Findley Award. She lives in Toronto. And also as a side note for American listeners, Counterpoint recently released a reissuing of a lot of her novels, and they have beautiful matching covers because we have priorities here. And so as a note today, this book is about a series of sexual assaults that happened in an Mennonite community. So just a content warning. If you're listening in the car with small ears, you may not want to hear the discussion of that. It's kept to very much a minimum, but it is mentioned that it does happen. So just FYI as we head into our conversation today. So without further ado, here is our conversation with Miriam Toews. [00:02:45] Kendra Well, Miriam, we are so, so thrilled to talk to you today about your latest book. Welcome to the podcast. [00:02:52] Miriam Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. [00:02:54] Autumn I feel like Kendra and I have been talking about this book for so long. She read it first—in typical fashion with us—and texted me immediately was like, "Stop what you're doing and read WOMEN TALKING. I promise you won't be disappointed." So we're super excited to talk about it today. [00:03:14] Kendra I fell fast and hard for this novel, and I read it in one day. Another co- host, Jacqueline, she and I buddy-read it together. We just sat there in a book coma. And we were like, "Now what do we do with our lives now that the book is over?" [00:03:29] Miriam Yeah, well, I mean, thanks. That's really so cool. I appreciate hearing that. I'm glad that it's had that impact or effect on you. I've never heard the expression "book coma" before. But I think I might start using that. [00:03:51] Kendra Well, the book we're talking about today is WOMEN TALKING, and in the introduction, you have an author's note. And it says it's based on true events. And we started out the book, and these women in the community have to respond to a series of violence that's happened in their community. So who are these women? And what is the decision that they're having to make? [00:04:13] Miriam Well, I mean, the true story—the real women are women who are from the Manitoba colony, actually. In my book, I call it that Molochna Colony. And Molochna was the name of the first Mennonite community in Russia, where all of us Mennonites—I grew up with Mennonites anyway, came from—and that includes Mennonites in Bolivia. But so the women in the book are living in a very (as they are in real life) in an ultra- conservative Mennonite colony, a closed colony in Bolivia. In the book, it's not stated specifically where the colony is, but in real life, as I say, it's in Bolivia, the Manitoba colony and Bolivia. And it's named after Manitoba, the province here in Canada, where I'm from and where the Mennonites who are there originally migrated from. It's a very isolated, remote colony. These are, like I said, very conservative, ultra-conservative, fundamentalist, authoritarian, patriarchal cultures where where the roles for men and women are very clear. And essentially the women are prisoners really within these communities. They don't speak the language of the country that they're in. They only speak the Mennonite language, which is an unwritten language. They're not educated. They're illiterate. They don't leave the colonies unless they're accompanied by men. They're virtual prisoners within these communities. And these communities are self- governed, self-policed. So when these sorts of attacks, these rapes or whatever it is, any type of violence, then when they occur, there is no recourse for the women, for anybody. In this case, the women weren't believed. Then when it finally was revealed, and the elders understood what had happened to them and believed them or claim to, they were simply told to forget about it, to forgive and to, you know. And that, of course, that they had been responsible for the attacks, which I guess is something that we women hear often in every type of society. [00:06:18] Autumn Yeah, that's so true. And there's so many things about this story that are unfortunately very relevant to today's culture or modern society. Instead of telling a nonfiction story, you chose to fictionalize this story. So what made you decide to tell the story in that particular way? And what does fiction bring to it that a nonfiction account of this might not have? [00:06:43] Miriam Yeah, it's an imagined response to the rape. I thought about different ways of getting into the story or telling the story. I realized that I didn't want to be reenact or recreate the rape. That seemed to me like a sort of extension of the violence, reviolating the women in a sense. And what I was more interested in was their response, their collective response and what they would do. And I wanted to create the urgency of that decision-making process and just the various questions. I had so many questions about this. How could this have happened? I mean, this is my community. I'm a Mennonite. I'm familiar with these patriarchal, authoritarian communities having grown up in one. And and so I had questions. I had some vague—I wouldn't say answers because that's not the job of a novelist. But, you know, I mean, I could kind of see it. I wasn't surprised when I heard about the rapes. I was horrified like everybody. But I wasn't surprised. And I don't think any Mennonites growing up in these types of communities would be too surprised either. But I mean, I am a fiction writer, so, you know, for me to fictionalize something is a kind of natural thing for me to do, where I'm most comfortable. I also feel that, you know, fiction lends itself to a certain kind of truth telling that maybe nonfiction doesn't necessarily. I wanted to have this kind of philosophical conversation, discussion between the women. And I guess in order to do that, I needed to fictionalize it. [00:08:20] Kendra When I think about this book and when I pitch it to people, I often think, have you ever seen TWELVE ANGRY MEN? The play or the movie or whatever. And it's, you know, a room and a bunch of dudes and they're talking. And they have to make a decision. And so I think about WOMEN TALKING. And in a lot of ways, it's similar. They're in this room, and they're having to make this choice and how they're going to respond to these events while the men are off in town and they have this opportunity. You just mentioned that they talk about philosophy and they also talk about theology. Did you plan to structure this book this way as an extended conversation over the course of a few days? How did that structure kind of come to be? [00:09:03] Miriam Yeah, I did plan eventually when I started seriously thinking about how I was going to do it.
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