American Deborah Eisenberg is the author of, most recently, the highly acclaimed story collection Twilight of the Superheroes. Her previous three collections have been praised for their psychological richness and stylistic breadth. A recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, the Rea Award, and three O. Henry Awards, she has garnered comparisons to such short story heavy-hitters as Alice Munro, although her style is entirely – delightfully – her own. Twilight of the Superheroes weds Eisenberg’s ferocious wit and deep understanding of her individual characters to a broader examination of post 9-11 uncertainty. Here, Canadian short story writer Heather Birrell talks to her about America’s “willful childishness”, the shape of her stories, the “professionalization” of writing, and why, when it comes to finding a room of one’s own, it’s best to lie, lie, lie.

Heather Birrell: I overheard a couple of young women in a coffee shop recently talking about the movie Superman Returns. One of them asserted that it was really boring, that the bad guy wasn't evil enough and that she wasn't sure she really believed the guy playing Superman, while the other countered, somewhat condescendingly, that the movie might not have been perfect, but she liked it because she could remember the old, original Superman – the first Superman movie that is – and that this new movie reminded her of the old one. I haven't seen the new movie, so I can't comment on its recourse to the original or its lack of absolutes when it comes to good/bad guys, but the whole exchange did make me think of the title – and seemingly touchstone – story of your new collection, Twilight of the Superheroes. In this post 9-11 story-in-chapters set in New York city, the narration alternates between the point-of-view of Nathaniel, a 28-year-old architect who
draws a comic strip called Passivityman in his free time, and his Uncle Lucien, an art dealer mourning both the passing of an era and his recently deceased wife. Both characters also seem stymied – if not completely paralyzed – by a sort of amorphous consciousness of culpability they cannot satisfactorily name. I'm especially intrigued by the way you so subtly allude to this sense of powerlessness and disorientation in a time when we seem swamped by naïve and conspicuous references – whether it be in the movies or on the news – to recycled and pseudo superheroes. Can you comment on the superpower/superhero trope in this story?

Deborah Eisenberg: Yes. It's both heart-rending and nauseating that the national impulse would be to seek solace and reinforcement at this moment, in, for instance, Superman as a representation of moral action. I can't claim to be an expert on the cast of Marvel Comics, or, in fact, to know much of anything about any of them, but nonetheless, they're present even in my inhospitable consciousness. So it seems that they must perfectly express something about our culture.

And I suppose that what it is they so perfectly express is our desire to understand our disproportionate power as power that's unambiguously and inevitably used for the benefit of humanity. Even in regard to the Unites States of the Second World War, this view might have merited a raised eyebrow or two, but now it's shockingly self-deceiving at the least, and pretty brutal. It seems to me that not only is there an enormous longing for what we imagine to have been a time of innocence in our recent history, but that there's also a sort of willful childishness, or, to put it another way, a self-congratulatory coyness in the way imagination is collecting around these figures now. Even the nostalgia doesn't seem quite authentic. It's as if there were something endearing, something loveable, about trying to maintain this view of ourselves as childishly innocent and good even though we know very well that it's not accurate – something gallant and charming. This is a form of bullying, in my opinion; a demonstration that we can afford (temporarily, anyhow) to hold on to these consoling charades of power-with-integrity, however degraded, even laughable,we understand them to be.

The fact is that the title of the story arrived very early on in writing it – which was a very, very long process – and I didn't think too much about it. It just seemed correct to me, and funny of course, as the title of a story about the probable end of an empire whose emblems are cartoons – irrepressible do-gooders in tights, and harmless little mice and ducks. But my poor superhero, Passivityman, took some time to constitute himself, and he sort of arrived backwards. I was really just thinking about how Nathaniel would portray his own characteristics in a comic book alter ego. Ultimately I realized that he would have spent a certain amount of energy in his life trying to rationalize or at least endure his passivity by reflecting – through however many veils of irony – on passivity's
beneficial properties.

From the very beginning of writing the story I was interested in the paradox that you mention – the anguishing amalgam of power and powerlessness that a citizen of the US lives with now. On the one hand the vote of each person here affects whole populations all over the planet and on the other hand there's nobody whom really, really a lot of us could feel even vaguely comfortable about voting for. We don't know how to alter or even influence the direction of this mammoth machine, even though we pay for it and, ostensibly, sit at its controls.

HB: I'd like to follow up on this idea of an "amalgam of power and powerlessness" in reference to the phenomenon of Americans abroad, whether traveling or doing business – a theme that has come up in some of your past stories, and resurfaces in "A Flaw in the Design", the final story in this most recent collection. The narrator of this story is a housewife and mother whose struggles to connect to her disenchanted son, Oliver, and please her husband John, have forced her to tamp down her emotions and redirect them into an extramarital affair. As she serves the two men dinner, John trots out a practiced sequence of rationalizations to justify his role in an oil and mineral company currently under investigation for its shady dealings abroad, as Oliver expresses his rage against his father (and all he represents) through a series of increasingly sarcastic ramblings.

Although Oliver is resolved to tell it like it is, his parents dismiss his angry lucidity as the rantings of a college student with too many ideas in his head. It is in fact implied that Oliver is mentally unstable, and that this innate instability – as opposed to the instability and scariness of his world – are the cause of his outbursts. In John's words, "Thank you, I do not understand what this is all about – what are we all supposed to be so tainted with? We may none of us be perfect, but one tries; one does, in my humble opinion, one's best." This seems to me a pretty good metaphor for the way much of the media in the US (and often in Canada) tend to pathologize impassioned truth tellers, and vilify (or ignore) those who have the guts to take their dissent to the streets. Looking back over the years the family spent in places like "Nigeria, or Burma, or Ecuador", Oliver's mother asks another question fundamental to her understanding of the world: "We brought Oliver up to share – naturally – but how does a child share with another child who has nothing at all?"

My partner Charles and I were recently in Quito, Ecuador volunteering at a school whose philosophy is based on the teachings of Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator and promoter of popular education. In March of this year, just before we arrived in Quito, thousands of mostly indigenous citizens had staged demonstrations that blocked traffic for days to protest their president's imminent signing of a free trade agreement with the US. The Ecuadorian government has yet to sign the agreement. At one point during our stay, Charles was talking to Lillian, one of the directors of the school, about all of the reasons why it was difficult (and possibly worthless in the long run) to continue doing the work that she did, considering the state of the world. I remember her shrugging and saying with a small but firm smile, "Poco a poco." Why was it, I wondered, that (at least with this particular group) disenchantment with the democratic process had led not to apathy or discouragement, but a movement truly of the people, independent of the established system? Do you think this type of grassroots action might ever take hold in the US, or will the Olivers of America always be deemed crackpot idealists or dangerous rebels?

DE: Actually, I don't think it's the case that there's a paucity of grassroots activity in the US; I think that there are, and always have been, lots and lots of grass roots movements here. Most mornings I turn on my radio to catch an incredible show called Democracy Now, and during the course of it, the host, Amy Goodman, very frequently talks to one fantastic person or another who's involved in grass roots activity.

And clearly, if it weren't for grass-roots movements our national history would have had a different, and worse, shape. For instance, Howard Zinn suggests, as I remember, that Lincoln threw his lot in with the anti-slavery movements because he understood very well that if he didn't, violence would end the system anyhow, and that the only way a federal government could maintain control would be to endorse that position itself. This is not to say either that all the pressure came from "the people" or that lethal racism and discrimination ended then or has since - far from it, obviously. But the difference between whether it's legal or it isn't to buy or sell – that is, to own – a person is a very substantial one. And there have been times when unions have had a very powerful voice here, and I myself had the privilege of seeing at close hand a number of very creative and forceful grass roots undertakings in areas of civil rights and against the Vietnam War.

But the very fact that there are so many people who actually don't become entirely demoralized, who don't simply give up, makes it all the more perplexing to consider what the obstacles here are to change, and why it is that people live increasingly badly in so many ways. Yes, why on earth is it so difficult for us to effect change for the better here – why have conditions deteriorated so badly for so many? Real wages have dropped so significantly, and the numbers of the working poor have risen sharply. Medical insurance is so astronomically expensive. And I find it simply amazing that women in this country once again may have to suffer a mortal fear of having sex unless they wish to become pregnant. And there's the shocking and geometrically increasing rate of incarcerations – possibly due to the privatization of prisons, which makes it so attractively profitable to keep people in cages. And then the constant de-regulations which make it possible for companies to levy impenetrable and generally meaningless surcharges and interest rates on customers, which primarily of course affects those who can't afford to pay for whatever thing or service in the first place. And yet it appears that opposition to deplorable circumstances of this sort is simply swallowed, or easily rendered ineffective. That's the mystery here, to me. Obviously one factor is that however many people are alert to circumstances and are actively working to improve their lot or the lot of those more disadvantaged than themselves, there are many more people who are tractable, very quick to subscribe to policy that actually runs directly counter to their interests. It's generally understood (though it's no less destructive a fact for that) that people here in the U.S. tend to identify, irrationally, upwards. And it's true that social (economic) mobility was at one time startlingly possible here; my own grandparents, for example, arrived destitute in the early 20th century, and like so many others who arrived similarly destitute, they worked very hard and eventually attained solidly middle-class comforts. That wasn't unusual at all. But now it's very unusual for people to be able to change class – upward, anyhow; it's very, very difficult.

And yet the chimera of mobility is apparently hypnotizing! The notion is reinforced over and over, in schools, in commercials, in popular entertainment, in the "news" media. This fable that the US is a meritocracy, that anyone from any background at all need only work hard in order to become a Vanderbilt is much more than a sentimental notion – it's serious propaganda, and it has an incalculable effect on policy and action. There's clearly a huge apparatus constantly working to disarm the disadvantaged. Not an overtly violent one, but one that implements a kind of disastrous confusion through media and education. One could just clutch one's head and fall down screaming when one sees how international events are reported in our mainstream media, for example. And, for another example, how are young people supposed to learn to think analytically if "intelligent design" is accorded equal value or even precedence in schools over evolutionary theory?

And all this of course is inextricable from the relentless materialism that's cultivated in regard to every area of life here. Our psyches have been truly conquered by the need to acquire and own, or rather by a terror of not acquiring or owning - a terror that's cultivated from birth on. I can't say I'm much of an exception to this terror, so I understand it pretty well from the inside. But because owning is considered evidence of merit, is in fact conflated with merit, we who are able to own are very easily pressed into service as sort of drones for (very) big business. That is, the premise is that if we have stuff we must deserve it, and we must therefore be morally unimpeachable.

And after all, it's constantly, relentlessly, drummed into people here that our country is the world's great benefactor - not its looter. So, on the one hand, we're sort of stooges. And on the other hand, we're beneficiaries! It's seamless, because it's very, very difficult to question a system that rewards you. So, as a big, stupid army whose role is to fight for more stuff, more fuel, more resources of every kind, we're very, very eager to believe that all that stuff is ours by right and we're very, very reluctant to see how we fit into the planetary picture – to see who's getting robbed or killed for our comfort, and even how badly damaged we ourselves are becoming. So I'm thinking that – especially in view of the benign disguise (or smiley face) of this apparatus – people who aren't actually desperate feel that they have every reason NOT to hope that things will change, and people who ARE desperate are up against something that's uniquely and uncannily crushing. Yes, I think that there's a special problem of comprehension here. And that it's very much in "the national interest," at least during this period (and it's been a long one) to characterize dissenters as "cranks," as "shrill" as "self-hating," and even, now, as "traitors." But as they say, the rain falls on rich and poor alike. And it's been falling and falling this summer and the oceans have been rising and winds roaring and fires raging and etc. etc. – and it seems to me that if most of us are content to commit or support massive atrocities on other continents, at least – due to the immediate and impinging evidence of global warming right at home - a lot of voices from the bottom might become audible to ears on the top. So maybe if the planet doesn't sizzle right up first, it might become clearer soon to a great many people that some very powerful lobbies and interest groups are worthy of serious opposition and that people who speculate about why so many of the former residents of New Orleans are homeless and disenfranchised while Halliburton (or is it Bechtel? I can't remember) is awarded fortunes to rebuild the place for rich folks might not be completely off their rockers.

HB: I think what is so tragic about this lack of comprehension – regarding the illusion of upward mobility, and addiction to stuff, stuff and more stuff – that you mention is that another American Dream is hovering somewhere above the TV satellite dishes, beyond the shopping malls and amusement parks. This other dream (and it's uncomfortable for me to make pronouncements like this, sitting as I am, on the sidelines in Canada) is, as you say, founded by innovators and revolutionaries unwilling to swallow the status quo. The other dream includes not only the possibility of change, but the promise of shelter from persecution, poverty and war, and a kind of safety and prosperity that does allow for betterment. I see a Canadian equivalent as recently as my parents' generation – my dad was a miner in Scotland at the age of 16, a factory worker in Canada (he arrived here in 1964 at the age of 21) for his whole life, but managed to scramble his way up to the middle class through hard work and union wages (many of these jobs have now migrated to where unions are nonexistent). I suppose the other facet of the "other" dream is multiculturalism, the possibility of a side-by-side respect among people of very different beliefs and traditions. My sister, a first generation Canadian who is now very pregnant, and whom I guess could be termed a cultural Christian (although we were raised on labour politics more than any religion) and her husband, a cultural Jew whose grandparents escaped persecution in Russia, have a Muslim midwife who recently immigrated to Canada from Lebanon. I am aware that it is sentimental and simplistic to say so, but I can't help but see this particular situation as a way forward, especially considering the horror of recent headlines.

It seems essential to safeguard all of this fragile hope – but how? While in Ecuador, I saw how it was possible to live quite happily with less and vowed I would do the same when I returned home, but – you're quite right! – the need to acquire is in the air we breathe, and it wasn't long before I was salivating over a pair of shoes (useless, beautiful shoes) in a shop window. Travel is one way of creating new neural pathways and integrating different ways of being – for me fiction is another route to revelation and a kind of inoculation against ignorance. But this doesn't mean I am still not uncertain as to how to actually act effectively once I am awake to new possibilities (a Nathaniel-style confusion) – a feeling common, I think, to many people of my generation, who possibly even saw activism modeled by their parents but can't figure out how to make it work for their own era. So, as you say, let's hope the nightmare of the weather somehow helps us to find our way…

In your story "Some Other, Better Otto", the protagonist, a curmudgeonly soul trying to come to terms with aging and his self-imposed estrangement from his family, has the following to say about his predicament: "Why did he need so many things in his life, Otto wondered; why did all these things have to be so special? Special, beautiful plates; special, beautiful furniture; special, beautiful everything. And all that specialness, it occurred to him, intended only to ensure that no one – especially himself – could possibly underestimate his value. Yet it actually served to illustrate how corroded he was, how threadbare his native resources, how impoverished his discourse with everything that lived and was human." Otto seems to have it all – a life partner, William, who loves him patiently and steadfastly, satisfying work and good friends. It is his sister Sharon, a schizophrenic, both blessed and cursed by an otherworldly intelligence, who throws him for a personal philosophical loop, forcing him to search for meaning and examine his many motivations.

I'd like to talk a little bit about the story form you have chosen (in this particular story and in general) and how it allows you as an author to examine this "impoverished discourse" between lovers and family members. A recent piece in Harper's by Jonathan Dee describes your stories as "exercises in the craziness of deep subjectivity, proudly unstreamlined, given over to the long, patient, psychological inhabitation of one character, one consciousness." As a reader, I find this "deep subjectivity" to be immensely appealing and rewarding, and somehow more honest than the omniscient narrative and broader canvas offered by many novels. And yet, your stories (some of which run over 40 pages) are not, strictly speaking, short (Dee refers to them as "big", rather than long – a useful distinction/description), and they certainly don't follow many of the rules we've come to associate with the short story form. Without asking you to explain your writerly voice – which would be a little like asking you to explain your eye colour – or where you "get your ideas", I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about the process that brought you to this form. Doubts, struggles, triumphs along the way?

DE: Sometimes I think that the general length of my stories is something that was genetically encoded. And sometimes I think it's been just something of an accident, or a misunderstanding. I started writing relatively late - very late, if you consider the fact that there wasn't something else I was hoping to do. I was 30, and it never occurred to me that the first piece I started with was going to be fiction, or even, strictly speaking "writing." I thought I was keeping a factual, and private, account of going to the YMCA once or twice a week. Even doing that scared me out of my wits, but amazingly, it turned out, after a very long, anguishing time, that I'd written a story (called "Days," which is in my first collection.) And the next thing I wrote – owing to a long chain of circumstances – was a play.

I'm a very, very slow writer, so I think that when I wrote my second story (which is called "What it was Like, Seeing Chris," and also appears in my first collection) I just proceeded as I had with my first, simply because I'd managed to write a first. That is, I didn't think about length at all, or about how someone is supposed to write a story – I just... wrote it. In fact, it never occurred to me until it was far too late to do anything about it that anyone thought that there were right ways to write something and wrong ways – and this I suppose was good fortune. I know that there are a plenty of people who feel that I write in some wrong way, but I really couldn't care less. Someone once quoted to me something that she thought might have been said by the violinist David Oistrach: "There are an infinite number of ways to do something right, but only one way to do something wrong: wrong." And that expresses my opinion perfectly. I wouldn't be able to define what it is I'm hoping to do in any given story, and anyway, I always have multiple purposes. But I think I can tell if I haven't yet managed to do what needs to be done, and if I haven't, that particular story isn't finished. I'm pleased if a story turns out to have a shapely narrative, but that's really never uppermost on my mind. I want to write the thing that seems to need to be written, rather than to fit what needs to be written into some shape that someone else thinks is the proper one. Often stories of mine have rather strange shapes, I suppose, because I don't look at life as shapely stories; I seem not able to do so. (And I don't think life wants me to, though there are magazine editors who might.) And it's not that I've chosen to write stories rather than novels – it's just that nothing I've written has happened to be a novel. Of course I do like to layer things up, and I like to keep things tuned pretty finely – and I don't like to say things twice!

As to struggles – writing for me is nothing but struggles. I arrive at what I'm doing very slowly. I suppose a piece begins for me when I register that there's something allluring to me, something alive, hidden from view, that I want to experience in words, and want to have other people experience, too. And then I try to approach that hidden thing in any way I can. Of course at a certain point it can become exciting, almost overwhelmingly so, but for a long, long time, it's terrible. Everything is indistinct; there seems to be no way to go about trying to locate or then to render whatever it might be. And even when I've found more or less the correct characters and situations, at first and for a very, very long time, everything I write seems banal and thin, and nothing I can get words to do matches what it is that wants to get done – nothing at all for a very long time. It often seems ridiculous to me that I write. I'm so poorly equipped to do it! I'm not what people mean when they use the word "verbal," that is, I'm not especially articulate or clever. I certainly never have "ideas" and even when I was a child making up stories with my little cousins, I couldn't think of any thing interesting to happen in them – I suppose that even then what really interested me wasn't "things that happen." And to this day, I have no ease in the mysterious realm of identifying the object of my interest. Possibly I have no natural "way" of thinking or of talking about things, and I certainly feel that every time I write something I have to start from scratch, I have to find a new way to envision what's on my mind, a new way to talk about it. And then, when I've finished, I never really feel that I've made something that's adequately intense, adequately beautiful, adequately accurate – worthy!

When I'm in the very final stages of a story and assessing it with an almost violent scrutiny, if it feels like an actual entity and has some vitality and seems to put a foot into some new territory, then I'm elated, even if I haven't produced a fountain from a stone, or whatever. It's a wonderful thing to experience, and I suppose that it must provide some enduring fortification, but when something is truly finished, it's finished and over; one is facing forward, and it's just confusion, terror, and hair-tearing frustration all over again.

HB: I want to pick up on this idea of "things happening" or not in a story. This past weekend there was an article in the Globe & Mail addressing the gender divide in the reading public: women like fiction because they can empathize with the characters, and men like non-fiction because they want to read about big ideas and stuff happening. The article named "domestic" Canadian writers like Alice Munro and Carol Shields as examples of the type of authors whose works lead to stereotyping or the establishment of women's sub-genres. I find this type of dichotomizing (a word?) intensely annoying, especially when I consider your story "Window", which could, possibly unfairly, be described as a story "about" domestic abuse. The story, which opens with its protagonist, Kristina, and a young child, Noah, arriving after a long drive at her sister's house, traces Kristina's infatuation with Eli, a charismatic backwoods survivalist and gun-dealer who sweeps her off her feet and whisks her away from her flat, small town existence. It is a haunting, intensely moving story (saturated by Kristina's ideas and emotions) in which, in my opinion, a huge thing happens – Kristina leaves Eli, whose magnetic, conniving charm has been camouflaging a dark and violent streak. And yet, just as it is somewhat unclear (even to Kristina herself) why she ended up with Eli in the first place, her motives for leaving (with his child from a previous liaison with a mysteriously disappeared woman named Zoe) also remain somewhat murky:

What I find so refreshing and compelling about your stories in general is that they acknowledge that we seldom up and "make decisions" about our lives, and that often the purposes we confess to are shrouded in doubt, misunderstanding and the distractions of the day-to-day. Can you comment on this and maybe talk a bit about the genesis of "Window"?

DE: There could be statistics out there to support the hypothesis that women like fiction and men like non-fiction, but in my experience, most people who read, read both fiction and non-fiction, and people who read predominantly one or the other don't fall into neat categories.

And making a distinction between "characters" on the one hand, and "big ideas and stuff happening" on the other, is predicated on a bunch of truly insubstantial, in my opinion, notions – for instance that: A) behavior is utterly opaque, or meaningless, and that one learns absolutely nothing about human life from reading, say, Dostoyevski, or – to use an example that was actually cited – Alice Munro, and that understanding human life has no relation to as "big ideas;" B) "big ideas" are confined to certain very specific, easily articulated assertions; C) there's some unassailably evident relationship between "big ideas" and "stuff happening;" and D) that it's possible to discern with no difficulty at all 1) what a thing is, and 2) how "it" "happens."

But those who are seriously interested in examining what it means for "something" to "happen," are likely to turn their attention to fiction – which is surely the best way to explore such questions! That is, if you want to learn exactly when such and such a plane crashed at exactly what angle and time into such and such a building, obviously you turn to non-fiction. But if you want to think about HOW a situation of that sort could have come about, and what that situation actually IS, you're probably better off reading fiction, which is perfectly suited to penetrating the mysteries of the psyche and human behavior and feeling.

Which comes back to this word "characters." And I guess I also want to say that I think it's odd that so many people now seem to insist that it's necessary for characters to be "likeable" so that readers will "empathize" with them. I myself don't see why characters in a book should be any more likeable, whatever that really means, than characters in real life. Fiction strives to represent and clarify, not obfuscate and flatter. I don't comprehend why a reader would only be able to empathize with a likeable character, and I REALLY don't comprehend why it should be necessary to empathize with a character in order to UNDERSTAND that character, or ENJOY what you're reading!

I'm not sure how "Window" came about. It's a story I started many times, over many years, but I just never got anywhere with it. I always began it in the woods, because I think that was the initial image for me - that and an image of a dream Christina was having of herself and Eli, which never ultimately made it into the finished story, though the feeling of it guided me. But then somehow the half sister, Alma, showed up, and it suddenly became possible to work on the story.

It's true that I'm very interested in how it is that people come to be living their lives the way they are, and in that story pretty explicitly so. It's partly what we were talking about earlier – that people, in my part of the world, at least, tend to overestimate the degree of control they have over their lives, and their freedom of choice. Though at the same time, people so rarely imagine and initiate alternatives! A paradox. I think often that "choice" is retrospective – that you find yourself doing something and you believe that's what you've chosen to do, that your actions are the result of a decision, or at least that they're rational in some way. Also, I believe that usually by the time you think "I need to make a decision about this" the decision has already been made. I believe that people can't really know with any clarity why they've made one decision rather than another, because what really goes into a decision isn't so much a set of factors that one can consciously sort out, but instead is a compound of all kinds of influences that are deeply buried and far flung, both inside and outside of oneself, over which one's control is necessarily minimal – both because they're hidden, and because they themselves have histories; I think of actions as a sort of compromise between factors and impulses one doesn't know much about.

I suppose, come to think of it, that you could say that this story, "Window" is a story about someone seizing control, seizing it to the degree she can, with results that are sure to be strange and unsatisfactory, over the needs, fears, conditions that have determined her life up ’til then. That is, I think no one starts from scratch – and certainly not at birth.

HB: One more question of sorts – and an advance thank you for being so forthright throughout this discussion; it's been an absolute (and edifying) pleasure. I was thinking about what you said about being a slow writer, and not caring about other people's prescriptions regarding a "right" or a "wrong" way to write. I wonder how you manage to shut out some of the din (pressure to produce/publish, to write something more/less "marketable") that accompanies the writing vocation – I know that I sometimes find it near impossible to hear myself think through the white noise of various media and the well-meaning commentary of friends and family… I liked your David Oistrach quotation. Any other strategies, suggestions, bits of counsel or warning that have bolstered you as a writer?

DE: Well, I've always been kind of ornery, which I think is helpful in this regard. And I've always felt that one thing, and probably the only thing, I should get to have complete control over is my own writing. There's no one who can know better than I do how I want my writing to be and how to get it to be that way. Of course other people might know much better than I how other people want a piece of writing to be, but that's of no concern to me – I want what I make to be the way I think it should be.

If most fiction is made according to a general idea of what fiction ought to be, then most fiction is going to be fairly predictable. And people who want, and are accustomed to, predictable fiction are unlikely to be good at engaging in the very active process of reading – they merely want their expectations met, and are perplexed when their expectations aren't met. So it's a self-perpetuating, actually a self-generating, situation, and I think it's a fine thing to meet it head on with a simple refusal.

The situation has become much more pronounced in recent years, I have no doubt, with the increasing "professionalization" of writing. On the one hand, independent publishing houses have largely been subsumed by big corporations, which are naturally beholden to their shareholders, and thus, reasonably, do whatever they can to cultivate writing as "product." It doesn't matter whether a corporation is making beer or fiction or valves, the shareholders have invested for profit. And on the other hand, writing programs feed into the great big jaws of the publishing machine, so it's a real system. Sometimes very young writers, as you know, find themselves sitting on a great heap of money these days, which they've received for a manuscript that might not be great but which might plausibly have the potential to generate a serious amount of money.

That's where a lot of the distracting and confusing noise comes in, I think. Agents and publishers now are less likely – whether they know it or not – to be saying, "I think this would be better if you did x to it" than "I think this might make more money if you did x to it." The world of ostensibly respectable fiction has become a lot like the world of screenwriting, but no one says so – not at all. Most writers are not encouraged to do the best work they could do nor are they necessarily rewarded for doing their best work. Well, this is hardly remarkable, but I do think it's more pronounced, and more institutionalized than it ever has been. And I think a lot of young writers get chewed up in this unfortunate way.

It was much less of a problem when I was young, because, as it was extremely unlikely that you'd make any money by writing, few writers were particularly trying to do that, and few agents or publishers were harrassing you to try. And the celebrity aspect of fiction, though not entirely absent, was restricted to a very few writers, mostly brilliant old codgers.

Also, sincerely idiosyncratic writing was honored, and even valued (I think – or maybe this is just nostalgic romanticism.) But really – can you imagine what it might be like if Jane Bowles were to submit her work for the first time to publishers now? She might eventually become published if she were a young woman today, but I can't imagine that she'd be allowed to find much of an audience; I'd assume that her work would appear exclusively in small, adventurous journals. And most of us then would never have the great joy of reading this marvelous, delicious, magical fiction!

I hate to think about publishing! And I try not to when I don't have to. It really is demoralizing, and perhaps it's even more so to most young writers than it is to me, at my age; it's so seamlessly a part of the culture. And also, when I was young, a "bad attitude" and habitual scepticism were accessories that every writer, more or less, had. Also, when I was young, privacy was generally considered to be a precondition for writing, just as it was for sex, and as it is not, now, for either. Not that I was writing when I was young, exactly, but I did absorb the attitudes prevalent in my youth. For me it's still crucial to have as much privacy as possible in order to work, and, anyhow, I think it would have been at any time, no matter what the prevailing attitudes.

I suppose if I have any advice for young writers, it would be, first, not to develop expensive tastes, and second, to give yourself privacy. I understand why people would want to be in an MFA program – in fact, I teach in one, a very good one, I think. But that is itself a pretty intimate situation, and writers generally need some other people, preferably a small community of other writers, to read their work. But I'd discourage young people from showing their work to their friends who aren't writers and definitely from showing their work to their family! People expect you to be a certain way, and they want you to be a certain way, but in your writing you're likely to be very different from the way you are in your life, and you should have the freedom to be any way at all. That can upset your friends and family, and also, friends and family often can't really see through their expectations to what's actually on the pages you've handed them. And also, sometimes friends and family don't understand why you wouldn't want to show them something that you're working on; people who don't themselves write tend not to understand that until you've absolutely finished something to your satisfaction, that thing isn't really anything.

When I started writing – and it took me a very long time to get going – I used to lie a lot about what I was doing. I felt much less humiliated when people were angry or contemptuous of me for apparently doing nothing than I would have felt if I had told people I was trying to write. And that was a reason, too, why I wasn't particularly eager to rush into being published; I wanted to protract the period of my privacy as long as I could.

Lying was very useful to me. When people asked me what I was doing with my time, I'd simply lie, and say 'nothing.' Consequently, of course, I had to deal with people saying, "Well, then why don't you come watch me get my hair set?" or whatever. But it was still easier than getting pummeled with questions and opinions about writing and requests to see what I was doing. I'd recommend lying to any young writer!

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Heather Birrell's collection of short fiction, I know you are but what am I? was published in April 2004 by Coach House Books.  A recipient of Concordia University’s David McKeen award, her stories have appeared in Prism International,  the New Quarterly, Descant, Matrix and She Writes, and she has twice been included in the Journey Prize Anthology.