Writer’s Block: M. Jay Smith

All Lit Up: Tell us about your new book. What can readers expect?

M. JAY SMITH: Cantaloupe! is a collection of short fiction. It’s a collection of (in my publisher’s words) “nine juicy stories about trying (and failing) to do the right thing—about yearning to stay true to yourself in a culture that demands compromise.” So expect some literary-ish prose, some slapstick, some feminism, some critique of oil economies.

ALU: What do you hope readers take away from your book?

MJS: Books take a long time to come into the world! I wrote some of these stories almost a decade ago. Because of this, my message today from Cantaloupe! is slightly different than the preoccupation that motivated it. Then, I was obsessed with the micro-compromises we all make to exist in a society that we don’t necessarily agree with, ethically or morally or philosophically. Those compromises and contradictions still exist, but we survive on social connection, optimism, and care.

Many of these stories are set in Edmonton, and one of the things that I love about my hometown is that we are, fundamentally, the most resilient optimists. We live in a beautiful place with garbage politics: we have to be. Fascism is on the rise, racism is on the rise, everyone suddenly hates bike lanes. I think my stories capture a very Edmontonian type of resistance. So I’m happy to share that with the world. Albertans, on the whole, get a very stereotyped rap. Either we’re talking about oil or we’re talking about mountains. (And, to be fair, both these feature in Cantaloupe!) But there’s massive richness, humour, and complexity to our culture here.

It reminds me of HD’s The Walls Do Not Fall, her poetic account of living through the Second World War. I’m going to quote some of it! In this excerpt, the whale, to me, stands for the horror of fascism and the Nazi’s material destruction of London:

so I in my own way know
that the whale

can not digest me:
be firm in your own small, static, limited

orbit and the shark-jaws
of outer circumstance

will spit you forth:
be indigestible, hard, ungiving.

And I think my stories have characters who are being hard and ungiving so as not to be digested by the whale. But HD also writes about the immediate recognition that the kindred have with each other, even from just walking past each other in the street and not saying a word. My stories are also that connection that might feel solitary or fleeting, but is still real and nourishing.

Also—short fiction is much cooler art form than people think. I hope my collection helps people realize that!

ALU: What inspired the idea for your latest book?

MJS: Years ago, my mum gave my son a page-a-day calendar of jokes. Usually these things are really, really bad. But this one was pretty good! The titular joke I made up, and retold it in so many variations that I abused my family into believing that it was no longer funny, but the rest of the stories have jokes from this calendar.

But, as I’ve put elsewhere in this interview, I was inspired by these moments of moral glitching, where it didn’t feel like I had a good choice, and I had to somehow reconcile my bad options with my ethics. Or watching other people encounter these sorts of moments.

ALU: How has your perspective on writing changed over time?

MJS: A lot! I’ve always written a lot. I love writing. I’ve never experienced writer’s block and I tend to have too many ideas and not enough time. That said, depictions of “too much” writing resonate with me.

In Sarah Manguso’s Ongoingness: the End of a Diary, for instance, she writes about giving up on her obsession to write everything down. It is graphomania. For years, she wrote as a protest to the ineffability of existence. She kept many diaries. If words could capture everything, she could record enough to words to pull it off. There were a lot of words involved.

I loved Manguso’s book. It resonated because once I, too, wrote everything down. My early degrees were in English—I studied Canadian experimental poetry and then aesthetic and political theory. I also wrote a lot of unconventional poetry. I kept journals with clotted margins. I scrawled bad poetry on the backs of receipts when I left the house without a notebook. Sometimes, this was during university, stopping on my walk home from the bar and fishing through my pockets to scribble on some scrap, pen breaking through to the thigh of my jeans. I ensured that magnificent language would not be lost. Thanks to my drunkenness, however, in the morning, the words were often illegible.

Anyway, in Manguso’s narrative, she has a baby and pregnancy brain deletes her need to record everything. As for me, I didn’t need to record time, I was okay with that slipping away. Rather, I was obsessed with the idea of brilliance. I thought that there was a limited number of great phrases—or that not catching them on paper would be some sort of great loss of inspiration. As you might imagine, this was a fairly insular way to write. I published quite a bit when I was younger, mostly in small literary magazines that were run by friends, but I had no grand schemes. My aesthetic preoccupations were too weird. And I didn’t care.

Then I also had children, and they ruined my practical ability to write all the time. Most of the writing I did when my children were young was for money. I wrote for all sorts of venues, some more prestigious than others. I made just enough money to squeak by. This, in my view, is a miserable way to write. You’re always looking two or six months forward, rather than dreaming up big ideas. You’re jumping to deadlines—and, I mean, I’m so good at deadlines now, journalism does this to you, so that’s a good thing—but not ever given the chance to zoom out and think.

Eventually, I went to law school. I wanted the chance to think those more meticulous, zoomed-out thoughts again. A stable income was another big thing for me. (I was unhireable then and, plot twist, I’m unhireable now, but that’s a digression.) While law school is typically characterized as a sell-out’s fate, a factory where interesting thinkers turn into crude capitalists, and leftists become indistinguishable from business school douche bros, that wasn’t my experience. Law school had no shortage of interesting and principled people. And I loved the intellectual challenge. Particularly, the challenge of being exquisitely logical. Coming from a background of experimental poetry and an attitude of generally refuting conventional narrative structure, my big blind spot was this sort of logical sequencing. I wasn’t incapable of it, intellectually, but I was not experienced at pulling it off well in practice. Law school and lawyering was great for forcing me to lay it out on paper.

Ironically, as I’ve become older, I worry less a stroke of brilliance will get away. If I’m falling asleep and something wonderful comes to me, I make an effort to remember it in the morning, but if I don’t remember it, I don’t. (I still keep a notebook by my bed, but rarely use it.) But, and here is the irony, I’ve realized that writing well is about writing strategically and purposefully, rather than scribbling away and being at the mercy of the great thought that I happen across in the moment. So it’s definitely less writing, but letting go of that romantic ideal of lightning bolts of inspiration has meant that I fully realize that writing is actually the work of writing.

This, along with more quotidian changes like my children being older and my income being more secure, has really enabled me to work more successfully in longer forms. Ten years ago, I couldn’t imagine writing a book-length project that was just about one thing, which is what my current project is—a long-form work of auto-fiction about a trip I made to Brooklyn to watch a one-man performance of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Cantaloupe! being a collection of thematically related short fiction is also proof of this development.

Right now, I’m in the phase where I read writers who have embraced their wackiness and are making it work. I feel like, having been told so many times that I was not making sense or too weird when I was younger, I’m still deleting my zaniness. My goal is to rediscover and reintegrate that weirdness in my work. (Though I imagine, in saying this, readers of Cantaloupe! might say, nah, you’re still pretty weird. You’re good.)

ALU: Are there any real-life experiences or people that have influenced your storytelling?

MJS: I live in Alberta, where I feel that I’m constantly asked both to stand up for my principles—opposing rising white supremacy and our provincial government’s fascist tendencies, for instance—and betray them by participating in day-to-day life. How does one find employment to pay one’s rising food bills when virtually every type of employment I’m qualified to have is a compromise? Or, put even more basically, when I go shopping for groceries, I have the choice of supporting a grocery conglomerate like Loblaw’s—my sister told me recently that Galen Weston Jr., the former CEO of Loblaw’s, during the height of the bread price-fixing scandal, bought a yacht and named it “Loaf.” I was horrified. I looked it up when I got home and it was actually called, “bread.” Bread, loaf, even dough… they’re all terrible double entendres. Yet G.W. Jr rolled with it. Only the worst sort of person, while helming a company under criminal investigation for price fixing, buys a yacht with his morass of money and, then, christens the thing to flaunt his impunity. Because how much did you or I pocket from that class action settlement? Fifty dollars? If you signed up (I did not). And, barring extreme mischief, CEOs aren’t personally liable for the shenanigans of their corporations. So Galen knew he was immune to any real consequence of the price-fixing. So name that yacht “Bread.” He’s still got lots of bread.

Anyway, so I can go to Superstore, and support this nonsense. Or I can go to one of two virtuously locally owned grocery stores. One has openly campaigned against increases in minimum wages and is apparently a big UCP supporter; the other is currently being sold under court supervision because of, in the words of the presiding judge, “cheque kiting, on an astonishing scale.” They’re all bad capitalists. How does one navigate this cesspool?

My Marxist friends would just gesture at capitalism and shrug. Or maybe start talking about community gardens and backyard agriculture and food co-ops and such. But I’m not going to milk a cow, I have a day job. The food co-op is on the other side of town, massively inconveniently. My backyard garden is great, but my family eats year-round. Where is the line that you draw between having a sense of moral principles and any sort of practicality?

Groceries are just an example, but it goes to everywhere and everything. Short of buying a hunk of land and living in a self-sustaining intentional community—I just finished reading Yesteryear and it depicts well that vortex intersection between hard leftists, rightwing preppers, and social conservatives; what do you do about dental care and medical interventions? It’s clear you’re risking self-harm when you renounce what is good about society in order to abnegate what is bad—so what do you do?

Several of the stories in my collection portray characters blatantly struggling with striking this balance. How do you deal with the fact that, in Alberta, you are bound to find yourself in conversation with someone who has the most repugnant politics you can possibly imagine? (For some people, that person is me!) Do you stop hanging out with your friends who suddenly hate immigrants or think the skies are being seeded with storm clouds by the federal government? (When Alberta wrests itself free from Canada, the feds will no longer be able to make it rain on us as punishment. This is an actual separatist belief. People believe that.) Or do you stick around, thinking that maybe their having one friend who isn’t totally down the rabbit hole will somehow moderate things? These are the weird calculations you don’t have to make in a place like Toronto or Vancouver or Brooklyn.

More practically, I’m inspired by my life! Many of those close to me will see glimpses of my real life in these stories. Before writing this collection, I’d eye-roll when an author made caveats like this. But it’s true! This isn’t representative work! It’s so much pastiche made from the raw materials of my lived life. But I’m not trying to do portraits—ugh—or comment on anything that I’ve actually experienced. Except for the bigger themes that I’ve already talked about!

M. Jay Smith is a writer and lawyer who lives in Edmonton. Her non-fiction, fiction, and poetry has appeared in publications such as Reader’s Digest, Hazlitt, Los Angeles Times, 18 Bridges, The Walrus, Today’s Parent, Prairie Fire, Plenitude and Filling Station. Cantaloupe! is her debut collection of fiction.