Your cart is currently empty!
Women Asking Women: Heather Birrell & Meg Todd
Heather Birrell (Born, Coach House Books) and Meg Todd (Most Grievous Fault, Nightwood Editions) discuss how their novels use deeply interior points of view to probe human complexity: how people think, relate, and fail to understand one another. They reflect on the classroom and the inner city as microcosms of society—spaces full of overlapping voices, trauma, and imperfect attempts at care.
In honour of Women’s History Month, we asked women writers from across the country to pair up and interview each other about their process, their inspirations, and everything in between.
Interview: Heather Birrell & Meg Todd
MEG TODD: Born is told through the minds of various characters, including a woman giving birth, a troubled white youth, a Jamaican-Canadian, a devout Muslim, an almost-ghost, a school counsellor, and even the class as a whole. What led you to choose these characters specifically and were they with you from the outset, or did you find yourself dropping or adding characters as the novel progressed? What was it about the story (or about you as a writer) that led you specifically to these points of view?
HEATHER BIRRELL: The novel started with Elise (the teacher) and her point-of-view, but it quickly became obvious to me that hers was only a small part of the story I wanted to tell. I knew that as she got further into her labour, she would likely become less able to articulate what was happening around her. Also, what makes the idea of a classroom rich for me as a source of inspiration, is the multiplicity of voices and experiences it encompasses. Including multiple voices allowed me to explore the overlap and layering of points-of-view that can allow a learning community to survive or stumble. I have experience working as a high school teacher in Toronto; although I would argue that any public-school classroom is diverse in its make-up; a big city setting often has a wider range of backgrounds and identities represented. To me, this is a beautiful and unique situation, and one of the few truly public spaces that we seem to have left these days. So my characters grew out of my desire to reflect that Canadian urban reality. It was really important to me to include Anthony, the character who has “caused” the lockdown, and is the seeming-villain of the set-up. I wanted to complicate that narrative.
HEATHER: Although Most Grievous Fault is a novel, it feels very short story-like at times in its tight focus on an individual character’s consciousness; we witness Crystal’s struggles as a young single mother trying to both survive and self-actualize. The third person narrator is crouched in close, with access to Crystal’s thoughts and feelings. This creates a very authentic portrait of a person trying to understand and articulate the sensations that drive her, despite lacking a certain emotional fluency. Can you comment on your decision to tell the story in this way? Did you ever consider including other points-of-view or vantage points?
MEG: It’s not easy to access the heart and soul of a person like Crystal. She’s closed off, not just as a way to avoid the judgement of others, but also as a way to protect herself. She is wounded, she is a victim, and she has no recognizably redeemable strengths. It is uncomfortable and disconcerting to be too close to her. And yet the reader needs to be close in order to understand her, and understanding was my goal.
In my efforts to make Crystal accessible, I did try other points of view. In fact, the first version of the book was Becky’s diary. After writing that, I realized Crystal’s story would be more interesting. She was a mother and a daughter; she had more to lose and more to gain. But being true to a struggling single parent who is scarred and unable to face the cause of her trauma proved difficult. My first drafts of Crystal’s story were told in first person, present tense. But this very close embodiment of her meant that I had no credible access to the source of her pain, no way to articulate emotions that she herself couldn’t articulate. I was restricted by her protective resentment. In one version, I tried adding the point of view of a social worker, someone who related to Crystal because of their own unexamined issues, but this strategy required me to pull too far from Crystal. In the end, I found that the third person, past tense gave me the insight I needed and, at the same time, allowed me the freedom to move away from her when necessary. It felt like a kind of weaving—in and out, and back in. The only way to know her was to be her, and the only way to understand her was to pull back and examine the whole picture. That balance was what I’d been looking for. Getting there took a long time.
MEG: What makes this novel particularly interesting is the way you focus on the internal, thereby giving an inherently tense story room to breathe. You put us in the heads of the various characters as they struggle to cope and relate what’s happening to the complexities of their own lives. Can you discuss your decision to handle the fraught storyline this way, and share what it was like to step inside the heads of each of these characters?
HEATHER: This is my first (published) novel; I have written two short story collections and am a fan of the tight focus and access to consciousness the short story form allows. I wanted to bring that deep dive into character to the novel-form. Also, it is just my happy place when it comes to writing. I am inclined to agree with Lorrie Moore’s quip: “Plots are for dead people.” There was already a built-in drama in the premise, so I didn’t have to do a lot of work when it came to plotting and I could hang out with my people! Some of their stories came more easily to me as the scaffolding of the story just seemed to demand them. Others were more difficult to access—maybe because of my own identity stories? But I felt—and still feel—a kinship with all of them.
HEATHER: I have always objected to coming-of-age being limited to a child’s or adolescent’s experience. We experience important epiphanies and shifts in consciousness throughout our lives! (And sometimes we learn the same lessons repeatedly…) This feels very much like a coming-of-age story, although it belongs to a woman in her 20s. Did you intuit what Crystal would metabolize about herself and her relationships from the outset, or did you grow with her as a character as you were writing?
MEG: I agree. Coming-of-age is the universal story and it happens throughout our lives. I suppose one of the reasons I read fiction is to have that feeling evoked in me. To be awakened, or reawakened.
I wasn’t sure how the novel would end when I started writing. Crystal is 27 biologically, but so much about her is far, far younger. Her childhood and her typical coming-of-age years were stolen from her. She jumped from child to adult. And she was alone. Having that as my starting point, being with her there, and trying to climb from there into some sort of redeemable normalcy was a struggle and I struggled with Crystal. Would she make it? I didn’t know. She made decisions that I disagreed with and I did my best to steer her straight, but she would not turn. Of course, this is because she wasn’t ready. She wasn’t yet at that point where she could distinguish between the right road and the wrong road. I only realized this as I wrote. At the beginning of the process, I wasn’t fully aware of the kind of person Crystal was and I didn’t really know the people around her—I didn’t know Jean’s backstory and I didn’t know Tim’s history—and, although I don’t remember all the iterations, I do know that there have been many different endings, and it was the characters who led me there. I had to trust them. Once the characters were fully formed, I could create and move the plot points to suit their needs and wants. The journey wasn’t exactly linear. More of a give and take—shaping the plot and then unravelling the plot as I discovered something more about the character and found myself rearranging the plot accordingly.
MEG: I am intrigued by the intersections between the characters during this crisis. We see cooperation, independence, strength and vulnerability. They pull together in the face of a threat, and yet they are also introverted, questioning the meaning and quality and even the possibility of connection. At one point, Elise wonders if we ever really understand another person. Can you speak to how she might think about that question in the weeks or months after the events of the lockdown? Did the explorations and thought processes you went through during the writing of the novel impact the way you think about connections between people?
HEATHER: I’m not entirely sure how Elise would feel in the weeks or months after the lockdown…SPOILER ALERT: I imagine she’d be dizzy from lack of sleep tending to her newborn! But also massively thankful for the way those in her care came together to care for her. I’m not sure writing the novel changed how I thought so much as helped me articulate more fully some ideas that had been floating around in my head and heart. I don’t know if we can ever really understand each other. For me, the possibility of connection, and the imperative to keep searching for that connection, are what will allow us to survive and possibly build a better world. At its best, a public-school classroom can feel like a really successful group project, with everyone working according to their temperaments and abilities to achieve a shared goal despite differing agendas or identities. That our connections to each other can be flawed and incomplete—even problematic—and still be meaningful and worthwhile is a belief I cling to—sometimes desperately, sometimes joyfully.
HEATHER: I’m really interested in the role of helpers in this novel. There is Jean, a martyr-like figure who takes Crystal in when she is homeless and pregnant, Sara, Crystal’s co-worker and friend, and the school and church that Becky, Crystal’s 14-year-old daughter (possibly suffering from FASD) attends. It feels like individuals, communities, and institutions both support and undermine Crystal’s journey. The novel is so adept at describing both the relentlessness of living in a limbo created by intergenerational poverty and trauma and the difficulty in supporting those caught in this state. Is there something in your own experience or research that informed your creation of Crystal and her interactions with the “helpers”?
MEG: I volunteered in the inner city much as we see Jean doing in Most Grievous Fault. I was in my early twenties and I was profoundly impacted by the dispositions, the struggles and the hopes of the clients. I wondered how they had come to be where they were. I wondered how they would move forward. Some were submissive and gentle and some were angry and resentful. While sitting across the desk from them, I had the acute sense of them looking back at me. There were seconds where it was me sitting in that chair waiting to be given my weekly allowance. The experience has stayed with me and I think it affects my understanding of what help looks like and how it’s not always what we think it is.
True help is a meeting of minds, an understanding that runs far deeper than the kind of help we can usually offer. It implies a relationship between two people, one in need and the other with a solution. But sometimes that relationship is more complicated than we might expect. Each person has their reasons for being in the relationship. The moments of connection and full understanding between two people are fleeting, but still, this is what we seek and what, I think, we ought to seek.
The characters in Most Grievous Fault who try to help Crystal have their own stories, their own needs and wants, and eventually Crystal intuits and understands these ulterior motives. Before that point, she’s embarrassed, needing help and resenting that she needs it. She’s not ready and she hides behind anger, which offers protection and a way of maintaining dignity.
Perhaps selfless help is impossible and not even desirable because who are we if not people living in relationship? A give and take that’s equal, a sharing—finding that balance is not easy, especially for a person like Crystal, who is powerless. It’s difficult to be vulnerable, to ask for help, to accept help. And it’s not always possible to give the kind of help a person wants and needs, or to fully understand what that help might look like. But when we get there, when we have that kind of communion, the feeling of hope is significant and beautiful. I caught a little glimpse of this in that inner city experience.
* * *
Heather Birrell is the author of the Gerald Lampert award-winning poetry collection, Float and Scurry, and two story collections, Mad Hope (a Globe and Mail top fiction pick for 2012) and I know you are but what am I?. Heather’s work has been honoured with the Journey Prize for short fiction, the Edna Staebler Award for creative non-fiction, and ARC Magazine’s Reader’s Choice Award. She has been shortlisted for the KM Hunter Award and both National and Western Magazine Awards (Canada). Heather’s essay about motherhood appeared in The M Word, an anthology that broadens the conversation about what mothering means today, and an essay about post-partum depression was a notable mention in Best American Essays 2017. Heather teaches at a small alternative high school in Toronto, where she lives with her mother, partner, two daughters, and a whoodle named Angus.
Meg Todd grew up in the Alberta prairies. She is a two-time finalist for the CBC Short Story Prize, and her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Prairie Fire, PRISM international and elsewhere. Her debut short story collection, Exit Strategies, was a finalist for both the ReLit Award and the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and a BA in Religious Studies from the University of Calgary. She lives on Vancouver Island.
Photo of Meg by Anick Violette.
Many thanks to Heather and Meg for their thoughtful conversation on empathy, perspective, and connection in storytelling.
Order Born here and Most Grievous Fault here, or from your local bookseller.
Next up on Women Asking Women is Shawna Lemay and Margaret Macpherson. Stay tuned for their discussion on Friday.
