All Lit Up: Tell us about your new book. What can readers expect?
MATTHEW HEITI: One Soft Infested Summer is a book about parallel worlds, divided timelines, bodysnatching monsters, and city wide scavenger hunts. In 1980s North Ontario, two brothers battle a shadowy figure snatching kids in their neighbourhood of Kinder Hill, while in modern day Toronto a grown man-child and failed author races through backstreets, ravines, and subway tunnels, chasing the ghost of his final book, and the spectre of a child in a green raincoat. It’s a book you might concoct if you tossed a dogeared Stephen King “Kids on Bikes” paperback, a Betamax copy of The Goonies, and the twisty literary labyrinths of Jorge Luis Borges into a blender (with a few scoops of Alfred Hitchcock and Daphne du Maurier, for bad measure). In writing it, I tried to capture the redemptive sorcery of storytelling and how its power can make and unmake our sense of self.
ALU: What was your most rewarding moment as a writer?
MATTHEW: It made me unbelievably happy to find my first book in the used stack in BMV Books in my old neighbourhood in Toronto. I’m not sure if the person who got rid of it hated the book or liked it, but it felt good to be “used up.” My friend Matt’s grandfather was an author who used to sign his books “In Case of Fire, Toss in,” and so I uncapped a pen and included that on the inside cover. It would be nice if the book later helped to keep someone warm.
ALU: What books have you read lately that you can’t stop thinking about?
MATTHEW: In preparing for this book, I reread The Saturday Night Ghost Club by Craig Davidson. I love Craig’s more delightfully nasty work as Nick Cutter, but this might be my favourite. It’s a brilliant subversion of the story of the writer haunted by an imagined childhood summer in his hometown. I thought I knew where it was leading, but, just as we got there, the bottom falls out of the story in the best way, so quickly, my teeth clicked and I tasted blood.
Recently, a student and I read The Book of Grief and Hamburgers by Stuart Ross in a directed study. Stuart is a Canadian Indie Lit treasure, and this book walks a razor’s edge between heartbreak and laughter, both profoundly truthful. It’s such a personal discussion of how the author grieves, and strangely it comes to feel just as personal to the reader.
Last fall, I got the chance to interview Farzana Doctor in front of an audience at Wordstock, Sudbury’s annual literary festival. I get nervous talking to other writers, so in (obsessive) prep, I read most of her published books (all fantastic). I loved her most recent novel, The Beauty of Us, and its clever and ghostly use of multiple perspectives. But Seven has really stuck with me: a deeply moving exploration of personal mythology.
Okay, one more: Kim Fahner’s poetry collection, The Pollination Field (but I’d recommend any of her collections, or her debut novel, The Donaghue Girl). Not enough is written in and about our regions, and Kim has a way of grappling with, celebrating, and mythologizing what it is to be shaped by the landscape you live in. She also lives a street away from me. All my other neighbours think I’m a weirdo, so it’s nice to have another writer, a great one, and a friend (also a great one) nearby.
I lied. One “one more”: I’m rereading Russell Hoban’s Riddler Walker (I am always rereading this book somewhere in my mind), as I prepare to try (and fail) to teach it in a class on Ergodic Lit this winter. My friend Michael shoved it in my hands at the Owls Nest bookshop in Fredericton years ago and said “You should read this.” And you should, too. I’m not sure if a better book has ever been written. Hoban mastered a way of pointing toward something transcendent and revelatory and heartbreaking without ever stamping a foot on its tail.
ALU: How has your perspective on writing changed over time?
MATTHEW: I’ve lost my naivety, and I’m not sure if a stronger tool will ever take its place. I once thought nostalgia was a superpower, and now I’m worried it might be my downfall. I used to feel writing could be a way of life, and somehow it became an act of survival. When I was younger, I resisted writing teachers who pushed us to write about the world around us, to kick back against the dark we could perceive with our words, and by doing so try to carve out a better world in between, around, under, our lines. Yuck, I thought. A good story (if I was even capable of one) was all that mattered in the telling. Now, with more salt than pepper, going all wrinkly, I find myself unable to write about anything other than that over which I have no control.
ALU: If you could spend a day with one of your characters, who would it be and why?
MATTHEW: During the writing and rewriting (and re-rewriting) of this book, I read and reread the entire works of writer and folklorist Alan Garner. As children, we borrowed The Weirdstone of Brisingamen from the library so many times we probably filled a whole card with stamps. It’s a story about two siblings pursued by dark forces through the wilds of their childhood landscape. I’m always amazed to find the things we write are stories coiled within larger, older still stories.
I found myself in the UK two years ago, and I was able to make a visit to Alan Garner’s home, The Medicine House, which is also a museum. While I grazed the ancient beams above his hearth with my fingers, his own were busily at work tapping out revisions to his latest book, at 90 years old, in a room above us. I walked the labyrinth he’d built in his garden, thinking of the one I’d made back home, in the woods of Manitoulin Island, where I spend my summers writing. The next day, I hiked Alderley Edge, the wilds where Alan Garner played as a child. It’s an area where his family has lived for centuries, and the speck of land he has almost exclusively written about over his entire career, bringing to life, deconstructing, and mythologizing. I aspire to his conviction that writing in and of a place is “a subtle manner of owning and being owned.”
ALU: Do you have any rituals that you abide by when you’re writing?
MATTHEW: Writing itself is a ritual, I think. Eventually, once you’ve ridden out the waves of inspiration, you have to come to it, daily, constantly, rather than wait for the need to write to break over you. For me, this means finding (silly) ways to trick my body into thinking it’s feeling inspired every day.
I rise early, at sunrise if I can, in the summer. I stretch (because I’m getting creaky), and, because I can’t sit still and read as much as I like, I read while I stretch. Trying to hold your book in any kind of salutation or downward/upward/diagonal dog pose is a reason to get up early before anyone can see you attempt this. Then I make a cappuccino in an old lever press. I never used to be a coffee drinker until I hit my 40s, but now I appreciate the slowness of the ritual of grinding, steaming, pouring, and the ceremony of choosing a favourite cup. A uniform is another ritual of work, and, for me, this takes the form of knitted hand warmers. When I pull them on, I imagine my hands getting hot, the fingers needing to rattle across the keyboard. The wool is also a practical consideration when you’re working in a chilly winter attic.
A student in my class asked me why I walk to work. “I’m a writer, I can’t afford to drive,” would be an honest answer, but the truth is I can’t afford the time. Instead I told them, “My walking is my writing time,” which is equally true. In the spring and fall I take the walking path, skirting through the forest by the golf course. In winter, I cross Ramsey Lake by snowshoe. The simple act of motion, putting one foot in front of the other, is a momentum you forget when you’re moored at your desk. I might not always be thinking directly about my work while I walk, but, unfailingly, a solution to a problem, a missing piece, a new line—something useful seems to fall loose in my addled skull.
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Born in a meteor crater, Matthew Heiti is a Genie-nominated screenwriter, a playwright and creative writer living in Sudbury, Ontario. He has published drama and fiction including his first novel, The City Still Breathing (2013, Coach House Books) and Black Dog: 4 vs the wrld (2016, Playwrights Canada Press). His short fiction has been published in magazines, journals, and anthologies, winning several distinctions, including the Carter V. Cooper award and Grain Magazine’s short fiction prize. He teaches Creative Writing at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario where he lives. More about his writing can be found at harkback.org.
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