Steven Heighton is the author of the novel Afterlands, which has appeared in six countries; was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice along with a best book of the year selection in ten publications in Canada, the US, and the UK; and has been optioned for film. He is also the author of The Shadow Boxer, a Canadian bestseller and a Publishers Weekly Book of the Year. His work has been translated into ten languages, and his poems and stories have appeared in the London Review of Books, Poetry, Tin House, The Walrus, Europe, Agni, Poetry London, Brick, Best English Stories, and many others. Heighton has won several awards and has been nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Trillium Award, and Britain’s W.H. Smith Award. For more information on his newest novel, Every Lost Country please visit his website, http://www.stevenheighton.com/
1. How would you summarize your book in one sentence?
It's a novel about a humanitarian doctor, his daughter, and a Chinese-Canadian woman filmmaker who desert a mountaineering expedition, and its megalomaniacal leader, to involve themselves in a violent refugee crisis in Tibet.
2. How long did it take you to write this book?
I wrote the first sentence in May 2007 and finished the copy-edit just before Christmas 2009.
3. Where is your favorite place to write?
For prose, my study. For poetry, anywhere but my study--the kitchen table, a room in someone else's house, a train or bus, a cafe, a dimly lit bar. Anywhere other.
4. How do you choose your characters’ names?
I have no formula; I doubt I've ever arrived at any two characters' names in the same way. The names just need to sound and feel right.
Interesting how, even if you try not to mean anything via your characters' names, they end up signifying anyway. Here's an example. I named my hard-edged Chinese-Canadian character, who was adopted in infancy by a white couple in Vancouver, "Amaris," finding the name a good fit for obscure, intuitive reasons I can no longer explain. Then I learned that one of the name's several competing etymologies correlates it with the Hebrew root for "bitter." At which point I also saw the amer in it--bitter in French. Then the Latin amor. The name's overlapping associations average out, I guess, to "bitter love". And those associations are there for readers (I myself am not one of them) who want a hint of allegory in their characters' names.
5. How many drafts do you go through?
With prose, about three main drafts involving large textual overhauls and insertions and deletions, and then another four or five polishing drafts, each entailing successively fewer and smaller improvements, mainly stylistic or factual.
6. If there was one book you wish you had written what would it be?
Sounds like you mean the book I set out to write every time--that's the one I wish I'd written, or will write. I never get there, of course, but the ideal remains.
I could leave my answer there, but now, having just finished for the first time George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, I'll add that I do wish I'd written it, or something like it. To have acted as Orwell did--not just talked or editorialized but acted--in going to Spain to fight the Fascists; to have survived a serious wound and the decimation of one's ideals; to have come home and written with a fastidious, unromantic, self-interrogating honesty about the experience; to have penned that great, lyrical last page about the countryside of childhood and "the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate"--and then, in the final line, to fiercely undercut that nostalgic idyll; that's all something to envy.
And he wrote the book in two or three months.
7. What’s your favourite city in the world?
Impossible question. My favourite city of the moment is Ypres, or Ieper in the Flemish spelling. I was just there. The heart of the old medieval town is a stunning place. But partly what I love is the weird virtuality of the spectacle--how the place is in fact a cunning replica of the original medieval town, since everything, including the magnificent Gothic cathedral, was shelled flat in the First World War and then, in the 20's, meticlously rebuilt, stone by stone, gargoyle by gargoyle. And you'd never know.
8. Do you listen to music while you write? If so, what kind??
I listen to music after I finish writing, especially while cooking dinner, but never while I write. I can't. Music seems to preoccupy the part of my brain that processes words--an interference that's counter-productive while I'm at work, though a welcome relief when I'm done. At that point I use music, booze, exercise--whatever does the trick--to short-circuit the word-wiring and mute the neural chatter.
9. Do you have a guilty pleasure read?
Most of my guilty distractions involve films on DVD, not reading. Even recreational reading I find too active to be a true escape.
10. What’s on your nightstand right now?
I've just finished my friend Jay Ruzesky's enchanting The Wolsenburg Clock. Am about to start Andre Gide's L'immoraliste.
11. Did you always want to be a writer?
Or else a singer-songwriter or visual artist. I was equally passionate about all three until my late teens, when for some reason I started to focus more on writing.
Actually, now I think of it, through my late teens and early twenties I did far less of all three pursuits--writing, guitar-playing, visual art--but writing was the one enthusiasm I phased out least. And in my mid-twenties it caught fire in me again.
12. What do you drink or eat while you write?
Coffee and Japanese tea (usually genmaicha, a green tea with bits of toasted rice in it). Sometimes red wine or beer if I'm working in the evening, usually on poetry or translations. I don't eat while I write unless I'm weltering in deadlines and have no choice but to eat at my desk.
13. Typewriter, laptop, or pen & paper?
Laptop for prose, though I print out each draft and scrawl messy marginal corrections with a pen. For poetry, pen for the first draft, typewriter for draft two (I use a 1940's Underwood manual: gorgeous old artifact), then laptop for draft three, with marginally annotated print-outs punctuating the process after that--so for each poem I end up with a stratified fossil record of between fifteen to thirty pages, draft on draft, with the latest version on the surface.
14. What did you do immediately after hearing that you were being published for the very first time?
I shouted, then started singing at the top of my lungs that great, exultant Patti Smith-Bruce Springsteen song, "Because the Night," the student rooming house empty, the acceptance letter and opened envelope clenched in my fist.
15. How do you decide which narrative point of view to write from?
I go by instinct. Lately I'm choosing a lot of female perspectives. I think I'm doing it partly out of sheer curiosity--I've always felt "write what you don't know and discover it in the telling" is as valid a piece of advice as the banal "write what you know"--but also as a way of avoiding a mid-career lapse into default mode. I mean, on one level it would be too easy for me to keep writing from the POV of male characters of my age and mindset and frame of reference. To avoid telling the same stories over and over, you have to keep reaching, extending yourself. It's basic neurology: you keep shaking things up and testing yourself or you go on autopilot for the rest of your life.
16. What is the best gift someone could give a writer?
Recently a woman who invited me to talk to her book group gave me three bottles of really good wine and a handwritten note. That combo would have to be high on any writer's shortlist.
Steven Heighton is the author of the novel Afterlands, which has appeared in six countries; was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice along with a best book of the year selection in ten publications in Canada, the US, and the UK; and has been optioned for film. He is also the author of The Shadow Boxer, a Canadian bestseller and a Publishers Weekly Book of the Year. His work has been translated into ten languages, and his poems and stories have appeared in the London Review of Books, Poetry, Tin House, The Walrus, Europe, Agni, Poetry London, Brick, Best English Stories, and many others. Heighton has won several awards and has been nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Trillium Award, and Britain’s W.H. Smith Award. For more information on his newest novel, Every Lost Country please visit his website, http://www.stevenheighton.com/
1. How would you summarize your book in one sentence?
It's a novel about a humanitarian doctor, his daughter, and a Chinese-Canadian woman filmmaker who desert a mountaineering expedition, and its megalomaniacal leader, to involve themselves in a violent refugee crisis in Tibet.
2. How long did it take you to write this book?
I wrote the first sentence in May 2007 and finished the copy-edit just before Christmas 2009.
3. Where is your favorite place to write?
For prose, my study. For poetry, anywhere but my study--the kitchen table, a room in someone else's house, a train or bus, a cafe, a dimly lit bar. Anywhere other.
4. How do you choose your characters’ names?
I have no formula; I doubt I've ever arrived at any two characters' names in the same way. The names just need to sound and feel right.
Interesting how, even if you try not to mean anything via your characters' names, they end up signifying anyway. Here's an example. I named my hard-edged Chinese-Canadian character, who was adopted in infancy by a white couple in Vancouver, "Amaris," finding the name a good fit for obscure, intuitive reasons I can no longer explain. Then I learned that one of the name's several competing etymologies correlates it with the Hebrew root for "bitter." At which point I also saw the amer in it--bitter in French. Then the Latin amor. The name's overlapping associations average out, I guess, to "bitter love". And those associations are there for readers (I myself am not one of them) who want a hint of allegory in their characters' names.
5. How many drafts do you go through?
With prose, about three main drafts involving large textual overhauls and insertions and deletions, and then another four or five polishing drafts, each entailing successively fewer and smaller improvements, mainly stylistic or factual.
6. If there was one book you wish you had written what would it be?
Sounds like you mean the book I set out to write every time--that's the one I wish I'd written, or will write. I never get there, of course, but the ideal remains.
I could leave my answer there, but now, having just finished for the first time George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, I'll add that I do wish I'd written it, or something like it. To have acted as Orwell did--not just talked or editorialized but acted--in going to Spain to fight the Fascists; to have survived a serious wound and the decimation of one's ideals; to have come home and written with a fastidious, unromantic, self-interrogating honesty about the experience; to have penned that great, lyrical last page about the countryside of childhood and "the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate"--and then, in the final line, to fiercely undercut that nostalgic idyll; that's all something to envy.
And he wrote the book in two or three months.
7. What’s your favourite city in the world?
Impossible question. My favourite city of the moment is Ypres, or Ieper in the Flemish spelling. I was just there. The heart of the old medieval town is a stunning place. But partly what I love is the weird virtuality of the spectacle--how the place is in fact a cunning replica of the original medieval town, since everything, including the magnificent Gothic cathedral, was shelled flat in the First World War and then, in the 20's, meticlously rebuilt, stone by stone, gargoyle by gargoyle. And you'd never know.
8. Do you listen to music while you write? If so, what kind??
I listen to music after I finish writing, especially while cooking dinner, but never while I write. I can't. Music seems to preoccupy the part of my brain that processes words--an interference that's counter-productive while I'm at work, though a welcome relief when I'm done. At that point I use music, booze, exercise--whatever does the trick--to short-circuit the word-wiring and mute the neural chatter.
9. Do you have a guilty pleasure read?
Most of my guilty distractions involve films on DVD, not reading. Even recreational reading I find too active to be a true escape.
10. What’s on your nightstand right now?
I've just finished my friend Jay Ruzesky's enchanting The Wolsenburg Clock. Am about to start Andre Gide's L'immoraliste.
11. Did you always want to be a writer?
Or else a singer-songwriter or visual artist. I was equally passionate about all three until my late teens, when for some reason I started to focus more on writing.
Actually, now I think of it, through my late teens and early twenties I did far less of all three pursuits--writing, guitar-playing, visual art--but writing was the one enthusiasm I phased out least. And in my mid-twenties it caught fire in me again.
12. What do you drink or eat while you write?
Coffee and Japanese tea (usually genmaicha, a green tea with bits of toasted rice in it). Sometimes red wine or beer if I'm working in the evening, usually on poetry or translations. I don't eat while I write unless I'm weltering in deadlines and have no choice but to eat at my desk.
13. Typewriter, laptop, or pen & paper?
Laptop for prose, though I print out each draft and scrawl messy marginal corrections with a pen. For poetry, pen for the first draft, typewriter for draft two (I use a 1940's Underwood manual: gorgeous old artifact), then laptop for draft three, with marginally annotated print-outs punctuating the process after that--so for each poem I end up with a stratified fossil record of between fifteen to thirty pages, draft on draft, with the latest version on the surface.
14. What did you do immediately after hearing that you were being published for the very first time?
I shouted, then started singing at the top of my lungs that great, exultant Patti Smith-Bruce Springsteen song, "Because the Night," the student rooming house empty, the acceptance letter and opened envelope clenched in my fist.
15. How do you decide which narrative point of view to write from?
I go by instinct. Lately I'm choosing a lot of female perspectives. I think I'm doing it partly out of sheer curiosity--I've always felt "write what you don't know and discover it in the telling" is as valid a piece of advice as the banal "write what you know"--but also as a way of avoiding a mid-career lapse into default mode. I mean, on one level it would be too easy for me to keep writing from the POV of male characters of my age and mindset and frame of reference. To avoid telling the same stories over and over, you have to keep reaching, extending yourself. It's basic neurology: you keep shaking things up and testing yourself or you go on autopilot for the rest of your life.
16. What is the best gift someone could give a writer?
Recently a woman who invited me to talk to her book group gave me three bottles of really good wine and a handwritten note. That combo would have to be high on any writer's shortlist.
Every Lost Country