Miriam Toews
Author of A TRUCE THAT IS NOT PEACE
Photo by: Mark Boucher
A deceptively simple question—Why do you write?—lies at the heart of Miriam Toews’s new memoir.
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Tasked by the Conversación Comité in Mexico City with delivering an adequate response, Toews contends with a flurry of why’s, minor and major in scale—why does a skunk with distemper keep returning to her house only to fall and become trapped in her window well? Why does she feel the need to commit words to the page? Why did her father and sister—both prone to intervals of silence—take their lives? These questions summon a cache of letters, dreams, fantasies, and memories which correspond with a deal she and her sister Marj made decades earlier: You live. And I’ll write.
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Written in vignettes equal parts jarring, intimate and humorous, Toews mines the void for meaning: does a violent dream symbolize the act of writing? Is it possible to curate a museum where mistrals and derechos and siroccos might live, for visitors to experience every type of wind? The Aeolian wind comes to mind when reflecting upon a period of her sister’s silence—If silence says more, why write?
While Toews ponders the the riddle of the Comité’s query, we become observers of her life as she walks the frozen Assiniboine River “feeling embarrassed about everything, specifically about writing, about being a person who moved words around, trying to make something”. She recalls the tiny aluminum boat that floated away one summer afternoon, leaving her family temporarily stranded on a remote island. A ham sandwich her father ordered during their last lunch together but didn’t eat. The yellow lined paper her sister once wrote to her on, “her neat sentences straight at first, then dipping downwards at the end like rigid fishing rods with baited lines.”
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She discovers a third spleen, shares a series of letters to Marj which document a ramble across Europe with an old boyfriend, delights in the role of grandmother, the chaos of a bustling household. But to the question of death in the face of life, silence in lieu of speech, or the particulars of why against the vast landscape of language, Toews is locked in a mad dance, circling questions that evade a definitive response.
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And yet a light beckons from the depths of uncertainty, a writer’s deal with her reader—a meeting of minds, an exchange, a lasting union, a way of finding hope and holding on.
Girls on the Page​
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In A Truce That is Not Peace you describe a memory from childhood: lying down in the dark backseat of the family Ford Custom 500, listening to “the hog-and-crop report”, touch-typing words in your mind, “as though that were the only way of proving to myself that I was alive, that what I was experiencing was real.” Where do you think a writer “begins”?
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Miriam Toews
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Maybe early in childhood, earlier than we think…when we start to identify patterns and with those patterns the urge to arrange and order them in our minds, like a type of mental housekeeping, into stories that assist in our survival. A framework for living. But who knows, really.
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What is your earliest memory of encountering a song or a story that transported you?
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I can still remember the songs and hymns my mother sang to me when I was a baby. I can remember her voice and the deeply consoling rhythm of the music. I couldn’t understand the words—like What a Friend We Have in Jesus, or whatever—I didn’t have language—but I remember the way my mother’s lap felt, curled up in it, and her arms around me, and the buzzing of her voice in my hair and even her scent, and the smell of the green woolen upholstery on the rocking chair and it all added up to a deep, deep feeling of peace and safety.​​
What are your feelings about a writer’s private world intersecting with the world at large? As you were writing Truce, was there ever a question of how much you were willing to share of your family’s experiences? ​
That’s just what writing is. A holler from one world to another or to many others…just an inquiry, a connection, an effort to prove you’re not alone. I’m considerate of the privacy of others, in my writing, if there’s something someone would prefer I didn’t write and I check in with my family all the time to ask them if they’re okay with what I’m sharing.
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Is writing to the dead the same as writing to the living we’ll never know? What is your relationship to the audience as you write?​
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I think in the actual writing of it, I’m not thinking of an audience. I’m only thinking of the one individual that I’m writing to, which is my sister. But at the same time I’m aware of people other than my sister reading it—and in fact my sister won’t read it, because she’s not alive—so the telling needs to be not full of shorthand or inside stuff. I guess what I’m saying is yes, the writing to the dead is sort of the same as writing to the living we’ll never know.
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“That’s just what writing is. A holler from one world to another or to many others… just an inquiry, a connection, an effort to prove you’re not alone.”
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—Miriam Toews
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What is your writing set-up like at home—do you have any rituals, comforts or obsessions that keep you company while you’re at work?
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Coffee. A lot of coffee. A tidy room. I write in the morning.
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On the subject of Wind Museums: describe the last great wind (actual or otherwise) that you experienced.
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Great question! Just a few weeks ago. The winds on the moors near the town of Haworth in the UK, where the Brontes lived.
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What does the act of writing feel like to you?
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The writer Patricia Lockwood describes it well:
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“The feeling is arrowness, nothing else. Hit the apple or split the head, you are happy, you are straight ahead, you are flying.”
Miriam Toews is the author of internationally acclaimed and bestselling novels Fight Night,
Women Talking, All My Puny Sorrows, and more. She is the winner of numerous awards, including the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.
She lives in Toronto.
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Interview by Emma Leokadia Walkiewicz
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