Miriam Toews: Chemical Peel
Mostly May 2023
I lead with orcas last month, too, sorry to repeat, BUT MY GIRLS ARE IN THE NEWS! I’ve now been neck-deep in captive orca YouTube since February, and let me tell you it’s fucking depressing. Like, really, really bad. If you’re not currently attempting to write a weird novel about marine mammals via rage-and-beauty-induced flowstate, and you’re not quite ready to self-immolate at SeaWorld, I do not recommend this rabbit hole. But my brain was soused in such sauce when I first read about orcas attacking boats off the Iberian coast, so of course I was deliriously excited for them, like, LET’S! FUCKING! GO! This was the end of April.
In early May I joined a Facebook group for yachters — I was up front about why I wanted to join, they let me in — so for the past month I’ve been soaking up the shocking information that many yachters are, frankly, total dicks. Though the group rules include no talk of harming orcas, there is such talk on the regular. There is also mucho talk of the value of human lives over that of the whales. Which, like…do lots of people just still feel that way? I guess? Am I so very naive?
There are also very nice yachters, for sure. I wouldn’t say the dominant vibe is “Kill the jerks, I deserve to sail!” But in certain threads, it’s definitely not not that.
The whole thing’s also complicated. One of the first vids about all this I consumed was this one, which, I warn you, is pretty terrifying. It’s not a big fancy yacht, it’s a small fishing boat from Morocco getting rocked by an orca gang, the fishermen praying as water floods the hull. According to anecdotes in the FB group, such boats are being attacked and even sunk regularly, but are not reported on like yachts are. As a vegan I’m not super into fishing, sure, but I’m also not into humans having to do their likely not-wildly-paying job in definitely scary, potentially deadly conditions.
Like so many things, the whole orca attack affair is likely a clusterfuck of overfishing, climate change, and, well, raging anthropocentric capitalism, you know?
Anyway, I was so happy when #IStandWithTheOrcas was trending on Twitter, White Gladis was getting her due. I love jokes, I loved to see people backing the whales, making fun of people’s fancy fucking boats. I hope the orcas soon agree it’s best to sink the big billowy ones, leave the little guys alone. But even if there continue to be poor fisherfolk getting hit, too, I guess a lot of what I feel is, well, why not? Why wouldn’t they? It’s not so shocking or weird that an apex predator, long known for being as intellectually smart as humans; for being possibly more emo than us (is it possible??); for enjoying hunting as both necessity and sport; for sometimes being assholes (orcas: they’re just like us!), should start fucking with us in times of trouble (lack of food, warming oceans, excessive noise, boat trauma, etc.) In many ways, what shocks me is that it took this long.
Writing
Speaking of my rage-and-beauty induced flowstate, lol, my novel has been somewhat limping along since mid-March — forward motion for sure, but lightly impaired. At the end of April, I went to see the inimitable Miriam Toews in conversation with poet, Karen Solie at York University, north of Toronto. My old friend from grad school, Pasha Malla teaches creative writing there and had organized the event, and I went with my wonderful co-writing buddy and mutual friend to Malla, Fiona King Foster. On the drive up, Fiona and I discussed various Novel Problems and I already felt such a balm of unburdening to discuss such things in a serious way. It had been a while.
If the drive was a balm, then Toews taking the stage was a whole-ass chemical peel, botox injection, laser resurfacing, stem cell facial, gorgeous acid bath. First, how she was dressed: I have to say I don’t fully remember, I wish I took more detailed notes, but even if I don’t have the specifics spot-on, I know that the vibe was zero makeup, a very casual pant, teeshirt, unbuttoned shirt overtop, somewhat messy pulled-back hair — just. A simple, frizzy, perfect look that I, too, could pull off without trying which is something I next-to-never say about a woman I’m watching on stage. That’s zero shade to people who love getting doodled up, I admire it, I love it, but to see Toews roll up that way for an event? The confidence, the courage, the lack of fucks given, the ownership of obliviousness to certain norms…whatever it was, I was inspired.
And then she spoke. Again, I wish I took better notes, what follows is from memory, paraphrased, forgive me. But there were three key Novel Problems Toews addressed during her wide-ranging chat with the lovely, engaged Solie that especially stayed with me:
“I mean, I write about real people, sometimes people in my life. Like, in Fight Night, that’s my mom, Grandma is my mom, and I think: ‘What am I doing when I do this? Is this a crime?’ I mean, it’s committing murder!”
“When I was working on Women Talking I was convinced that finishing it would literally kill me. Like, I was taking tons of aspirin to stave off a heart attack.”
“When I start a new book, I always start strong and then hit a wall about one hundred pages in and have to go back and start the whole thing over again. Every single time.”
I won’t go into whose Novel Probs were whose, but let me just say these resonated for Fiona and me; we laughed too loud and elbowed one another. Whenever I looked at Pasha who was seated up front due to his MC’ing duties, he was also beaming so hard. Let’s trot it out: I think we all felt seen? For me it was just really nice to be in this room with people who felt driven in the same way to somewhat ruin our lives for this thing. And because I love all of their books so much — Toews, Malla, Foster — I was reminded: it’s worth it, it’s worth it, it’s worth it. Books! They’re so good!
Caveat, of course: I don’t really want to die at the hands of my novel, murder all my loved ones, or start from scratch a million times if there’s no satisfaction for me, even if my readers love what I end up with. That would be weird, self-sacrificing bullshit. But so far, the satisfaction always returns, maybe in a volume that corresponds to the Problems. As long as that stays true, I won’t quit. As long as that stays true, I will harbour the fantasy of one day reading on the stage of a suburban university wearing a bag shaped dress and a poof of grey-brown hair, hoping attendees will buy my marine mammal book, and telling them too-excitedly about the ups and downs of writing it; I will harbour, too, the fantasy that at least one person listening will feel motivated to go on.
Reading
I re-read Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls, which, coincidentally, Pasha gifted to me at his own fortieth birthday party, the party at which Fiona and I met, whoa. Anyway, I fucking love Mrs. Caliban, which is about a housewife who falls in love with a giant amphibian escaped from a research facility. At 111 pages, it’s an object lesson in brevity, the dialogue kills, as I re-read the first two thirds I was screaming at David all day “This is the best book ever written, oh my god!” and then I remembered that I actually really hate the ending a lot. I won’t spoil it, it pertains to female friendship, maybe it has to do with Shakespeare’s The Tempest to which the title obv alludes, but I’m bad at following those kinds of threads and I just…wish it ended otherwise. If you’ve read it and want to discuss, so do I!
Beneath The Surface: Killer Whales, Seaworld, and the Truth Beyond Blackfish by John Hargrove: More orca stuff, I’ll keep it brief: this book is very good and very weird and I can’t believe John Hargrove’s life, honestly. A gay man from rural Texas, Hargrove became obsessed with becoming a killer whale trainer at Seaworld when he was a little kid, and, well, he did it. He swam with them, rode them, surfed on their backs, dove off their snouts, and yes, was held underwater and fucked with by them when they were in bad moods. He got out alive because he worked really hard to understand those whales and because he was incredibly lucky. Eventually he grew disillusioned and became a Seaworld whistleblower. I could go on for years, this book and the whole Hargrove-verse is truly a trip.
Vacuum in the Dark by Jen Beagin: I noticed all the reading girlies online raving about Beagin’s latest novel, Big Swiss, but I was too cheap to buy a hardcover book, and it was going to take eight years to get at the library, so I decided to start with her second book instead, Vacuum in the Dark. The protagonist, Mona, works as a cleaning lady in Taos, New Mexico, and has a variety of psychological and sexual adventures with her clients; survives an earthquake while visiting her pretty bad, flawlessly depicted mother in LA; generally makes me seethingly jealous of the ease with which she appears to be rendered — three dimensional, broken yet hopeful, straight-forwardly human — by the wildly talented, hilarious Beagin. Read it!
Still reading Megan Boyle’s
, which I wrote about extensively last month ICYMI. This month Boyle was at a writing residency in Sezze, Italy, a real treat for writer and reader alike. I really love having this daily, consistently accruing thing to look at when I get that want-to-scroll itch. A thing that actually makes me think and laugh and feel things in ways that Insta and Twitter rarely do these days.
Eating
One of my favourite things to do in the world is to write on a patio alongside a nice drink and something crunchy and/or salty to eat. It got hot in the middle of May, patio season was upon us, and I thoroughly enjoyed fries and olives and sourdough and whatnot all over town. But I get extra-excited when there’s something special for the vegans on the menu, and I found that at Praise Bottleshop on Bloor Street one warm night, blossoms cascading from the trees like snow. They offer a vegan leek paté with pita chips and I’ll be honest: the paté is just okay — too much vegan butter, too few leeks? But I’m giving it newsletter real estate because I just so appreciate an attempt to do something creative and fancy that’s vegan, even if it’s not knocked out of the park.
Also I had such a great time writing at Praise that I stayed past my post-work happy hour into the night and the bar started filling up with groups of friends twenty years my junior. I felt weird and somewhat elderly, but not really bad about either, typing hard with my big headphones on. At one point I was re-inducing my flowstate via Seaworld YouTube, and I imagined one of the twenty-somethings glancing at me, thinking “That’s nice, this old lady took herself out to watch killer whale shows with her wine,” like, thinking I just enjoyed them, this was how I relaxed and I laughed so hard at myself, my weird good life.
Thank you for reading, it means the whole world to me, bye!
We really enjoyed reading this
This was so great, thank you! I appreciated hearing about your writing process and researching the Orcas and some great and relatable novel writing insights.