Sheila Heti is the author of five books: the story collection, The Middle Stories (McSweeney’s Books); the novella, Ticknor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); How Should a Person Be? (Henry Holt); and an illustrated book for children, We Need a Horse (McSweeney’s McMullins) featuring art by Clare Rojas. With Misha Glouberman, she wrote a book of “conversational philosophy” called The Chairs Are Where the People Go (Faber), which The New Yorker chose as one of its Best Books of 2011. She works as Interviews Editor at The Believer, and has contributed long interviews with writers and artists to the magazine.

Michael Kimball: I feel as if I should know why the collection is called The Middle Stories, but I don’t. Tell me?

Sheila Heti: I had been writing these short stories for a few years, in my early twenties, not thinking they would end up as a book, so the stories came first. Then the manuscript. Then I had to think of a title. I spent a lot of time on this, consulting a thesaurus and drawing little book covers in my notebooks. One day between classes (I was university at the time) the title just came to me: The Middle Stories. Pretty instantly I felt a kind of relief and pleasure. I liked the way it sounded. It made sense to me. It was one of those situations where you make your brain work really really hard on a puzzle, then the solution comes from some other-brained place. I recall trying it out in phrases, “Have you read The Middle Stories?” — imagining writers I knew saying it.

Kimball: So let’s talk about how your brain works on a story. I’m most interested in what I think of as the startling aspects in your stories, the things that jolt the reader in different ways. So just to take the first story in the collection, how did you come up with the idea to write a story about a princess and a plumber (and also include a frog in the story, but not let that frog be a prince)? And how did you decide to start the story with that great scene where the princess is tanning in the garden outside the castle and the plumber tries to talk to her. And how did you come up with a line like, “Still, what did a frog know about love?” And what about that scene on the bus where the little girl claims to be “in the middle of a very bad nightmare” (within another characters reality)? Feel free to pick and choose.

Heti: Something funny about this story is that years later, I realised that the video game Super Mario Bros. is about a plumber trying to save a princess. I played that game a lot as a kid, so obviously somewhere in my subconscious was this thing about plumbers wanting to save princesses. But at the time of writing the story, I was not thinking about Super Mario. And you know my story which is a love story between a boy and a monkey? Just recently I was talking to a friend about that ridiculous tale we were taught in school in the ’80s about where AIDS came from (they said a man had sex with a monkey) and I wondered, “Is that where that story of mine came from?”

So I don’t know how the brain makes stories, but it must have to do with deep memories or deep symbols. Certainly when I was writing The Middle Stories there was no conscious deliberation — it was just one sentence following rather quickly on the heels of the previous sentence. I was trying to write as quickly as possible at the time, like to make myself into a kind of writing machine, where I was at once very alert and very exact, trying to write these stories that would come out perfectly, and which I wouldn’t have to edit. So I was training myself to do what felt right in each moment. In some way, it felt like dancing. There’s brain-thought when you’re dancing, but mostly it’s in your body — your body decides your next move. In the case of writing, I think it’s as much in the fingers as in the head. Maybe the fingers get you deeper than the brain does.

Kimball: Yeah, Super Mario Bros, I didn’t even think of that. I wasn’t very good at that one, but maybe the video game is why the story resonates the way it does. And so the fingers: when things feel right on the keyboard, it reminds me of how the fingers can feel so right when playing a video game well. Is there anything in that?

Heti: I don’t know because I was never a good enough video game player! And it’s been so long… But I’ve noticed lately that sometimes an unedited paragraph, just glanced at on the screen, can look messy and wrong, while an edited one can look really smooth and good.

Kimball: One of the most striking things to me about your stories is the way that the matter-of-fact tone works with the modern fairy tales to make anything possible. Could you talk about the tone – how you found your way to it and how you use it to such startling effect?

Heti: I guess since I wasn’t trying to create any effect, the tone ended up matter-of-fact. I don’t know. When I was writing this book, I was just coming out of the world of theatre school, where I was writing plays. When you write plays, you know actors are going to be speaking the lines and adding a lot of the emotion. Perhaps in my head was still that idea that the emotion would be added later. This is just guessing on my part. I didn’t really anticipate anyone finding the stories surprising or matter-of-fact. As for the fairy tale element, I was reading Grimm and Aesop and Hans Christian Anderson at the time, and living at my father’s house, in his basement. My father told me stories every night when I was a child before I went to bed. He would make them up. So maybe some combination of being near my father and having read those stories turned my stories in that direction. But I wasn’t intending to write fairy tales or anything. I was thinking of them as “short stories,” that’s all.

Kimball: In an interview with Dave Hickey, you said, “Increasingly I’m less interested in writing about fictional people, because it seems so tiresome to make up a fake person and put them through the paces of a fake story. I just — I can’t do it.” Could you maybe talk more about the idea of the short story (and fiction) and how it’s changed or how you’ve changed in relation to it?

Heti: When I said that, it was a few years into my work on How Should a Person Be? For a while by that point, writing fiction made no sense to me. It felt really meaningless. It was as if someone said, “Why don’t you do all these math problems” — setting before you a bunch of math problems — “and whatever numbers you come up with as answers with will be fine.” You would just be like, “Why should I bother doing these math problems?” There would be no fun or challenge in it. That’s how writing fiction felt to me: totally unconnected to anything real — both the process and the results.

I don’t know if fiction has changed, or if short stories have changed. But I’ve changed, I guess, in that I wanted to talk more directly to the world when I was writing How Should a Person Be? I didn’t care about that so much with The Middle Stories, so I had to find a way of bringing the world outside myself into my writing. Writing fiction all alone in a room – I just felt too isolated from the world. So I began taping conversations with my friends, and bringing that life into How Should a Person Be? and making up experiments with my friends, which I then wrote about in my novel as though those experiments were our real life. I tried to forge a stronger bond between the two.

Kimball: The stories in The Middle Stories are filled with the idea of the world changing and the characters can do nothing about it. “The Man with the Hat” is a story about change that cannot be controlled. In “The Princess and the Plumber,” the frog says, “The world is changing.” “The Woman Who Lived in Shoe,” the mailman says, “It’s a changing world.” “What Changed” is called, well, “What Changed.” Could you talk about why that idea shows up so explicitly in so many of the stories?

Heti: I never noticed that before. And no one has ever pointed it out until now. I suppose that was just how I felt at the time: that everything was changing. And yet at the same time, there’s a way in the stories in which nothing actually changes. People keep talking about change but everything is quite static, actually. Don’t you think? It’s not like the characters learn things and change. Or act differently as a result of what they’ve lived. That’s real change. I don’t think that ever happens in a story.

Kimball: Right, that’s true. The characters don’t change, but the world changes around them. Here’s a subject change: The opening paragraph of “My Favorite Monkey” made me want to go sit under a tree and see if anything romantic happened. Have you ever done that?

Heti: Probably not, but I think under a tree is a pretty romantic place to be. I wish I sat under trees more.

- – -

Michael Kimball is the author of Dear Everybody and, most recently, Us. His new novel, Big Ray, will publish September 18, 2012 (Bloomsbury).

Michael Bible is the author of Cowboy Maloney’s Electric City, as well as the chapbooks Gorilla Math and My Second Best Bear Rug. He was winner of the ESPN: the Magazine/Stymie fiction prize. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi where he edits Kitty Snacks.

Michael Kimball: I’m curious: How did you get the title? That feels like it must have been a key to writing the piece.

Michael Bible: As far as Simple Machines goes, the title actually came to me after I wrote it, but you’re right, it sort of crystallized it for me. I started the manuscript after I read The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed and I was playing around with random sentence generators and ESL textbooks. I love sentences that are used as examples for school. (Has someone written a book of word problems? Also, that would be a good title. Probably somebody’s written it.) There is an oddness to those example sentences that I love, “bad” writing as “good” writing. They have a kind of weird beauty and they seemly have no context but somehow make stories anyway. Simple Machines is also something I learned about in school so it made sense that that would be a good title.

Michael Kimball: I’m thinking that Word Problems should maybe be the next Awesome Machine title? I can already see the weird beauty in that too. But what I’m wondering is how you found the weird beauty in the sentences of Simple Machines. Did you just recognize it in the material random sentence generators and ESL textbooks or did it come from working with material or a combination or maybe something else?

Michael Bible: So much of school was about finding good writing. Or finding out why good writing is good writing. Learning correct grammar, clean syntax etc. This is a great short story because of xyz or this is a beautiful sentence because of xyz. I just didn’t buy it. So I sought out the “worst” writing I could find. I love accidents, malapropisms and slang. And technical writing, random sentence generators, ESL texts, etc. Things that are not trying to be beautiful. My teachers told me not to use thesauruses so I started to collect thesauruses. I like the ones from the early 20th century best. They’re not like thesauruses we have now. They were organized by theme and then under the themes the words were more associative. So it would start with something like “light” then there would be long (sometimes many pages long) entries below made up of words associated with light, not just synonyms. And the words would move with a loose logic. Like the author was riffing off the idea of light but it was supposed to be a technical book. The entries have a beautiful, almost poem-like way about them. The themes were big things like darkness, hate, money, love, death. I found all these things that were supposed to be bad writing strange and wonderful.

Michael Kimball: That movement you describe in those early thesauruses, it feels like the same kind of movement that happens in Simple Machines, though it’s on the level of the sentence rather than the word. That is, I’m wondering how you thought about getting from sentence to sentence.

Michael Bible: When you remove context, the mind tends to fill in the gaps. The thesauruses move thematically and I see Simple Machines as moving formally. Instead of the sentences collectively striving for a story or meaning, I’m trying to create an atmosphere. I’m interested in doing what minimalist music and sculpture does. Stripping things down to simple chunks and putting them together serially. Then the reader can walk into the book like someone walks into a room filled with small simple objects or like someone listens to a repetitious song. I want to let the reader have his own emotional response. I want to show the bricks of a house but not the house. The reader builds his own house in his mind. I’m just giving him the bricks.

Michael Kimball: So how did you know that you had made enough bricks for somebody else to build a house – or, how did you know that you had reached the end of Simple Machines?

Michael Bible: I wrote a lot of the sentences and cut the manuscript major. Then Ian and I cut them down even more. I think it was just a gut thing. I just thought, These are the best ones. This is where it should end.

Michael Kimball: Who’s Ian?

In perhaps a not entirely sober state, I started your book Us on Saturday night. It was midnight, plus or minus some time. I had many other books to read, but I started your book, and after I read the first paragraph, I wanted to read the whole thing, that night, but I fell asleep on page fifty, plus or minus some pages, and all night while I slept, I was angry at myself for falling asleep.

Michael Kimball, I started your book from the very beginning yesterday because I was perhaps not fully sober when I started the night before. I woke up unnecessarily early yesterday morning, despite having had a raucous night previously, not to mention the disturbed slumber, at 6:30. I propelled myself out of bed and picked up your book immediately. I read your book while I prepared my coffee.

Rather than check my email, I read your book.

I read your book while I walked to the café.

I read your book in the café.

I read your book in the car, going over to a friend’s house.

While with my friend, whom I will be departing within the month to move, I was distracted. I talked about your book. I wanted to read your book, rather than spend time with my friend.

We went to a movie, and while I watched it, I kept thinking about your book and how I wanted to read your book rather than passively watch a film. It was an entertaining film, but no movie can compare to the weight of your book.

When I got home, I made an excuse to go to the grocery store, such that I could read your book while walking.

While walking to the grocery store, I took circuitous routes.

I read your book while in the grocery store. I got some funny looks, but I barely noticed because I was reading your book.

I missed the oil aisle and had to circle back twice, but I didn’t mind because my absence of mind in the grocery store meant my presence of mind while in your narrative. I stood in the longest line, just to have a few more minutes reading. I was frustrated that the grocery clerk wanted to make small talk, because all I wanted was to read undisturbed. I bought my extra virgin olive oil.

I walked home from the grocery store. My shoulder hurt because of the weight of the olive oil bottle, plus the normal trash I have accumulated over the past three years that heavy my bag. In my left hand, I held your book, open, walking slowly, reading like it was weightless.

I finished your book just a few yards from my front door. I didn’t want to finish it. I wanted to finish it. It is one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read. I have not had this kind of torrid affair with a book before. I love books, I am always reading them. I am usually obsessed with the books I am reading. They often feel like affairs, but your book, it was different. It felt like the first time a boy held my hand—Douglas, a cellist, on an airplane from Sydney to LAX to San Antonio. A book has never made me feel this way.

It was love, Michael Kimball, but it was also mourning. Reading your book, I was transported back to the year 2000, when my father had a stroke and lost movement and lost consciousness and lost memory. I held his hand in the Intensive Care Unit and he couldn’t feel it. This is what your book felt like for me.

It was mourning, Michael Kimball, but it was also exaltation. Reading your book was like opening an email that said my first book would be published.

Your book was my grandmother’s funeral. Just a year earlier, my grandmother had a weak hip and I was helping her walk. She asked me for her walker, and I was lazy. I urged her to take the two steps necessary for her to get to the bed. I held my arms open to guide her. I held my arms open to hold her, but she missed. She fell and she was helpless on the ground and I was too small to lift her to the lip of the bed. I tried and she tried and she was on the bed and then she slipped off again. Three months later, she was in a nursing home. She would never recover. It was not my fault, not really, but I can’t shake the memory. Your book is that memory. Your book is a resurrection of all that pain.

Michael Kimball, your book contains in it all the glory of love. I am not a romantic, but I have never felt such love and romance for my husband as when I was reading your book. I have never felt so grateful. I have never felt such humility.

Your book, Michael Kimball, is the book I wish I could write. Your book is the book I wish every book could be. It is reification. It is haptic. It is ecstatic. Thank you, Michael Kimball, for Us.

Love, Lily

Michael Kimball is now the author of three of my favorite books. Before I read his latest, US, I had read and loved THE WAY THE FAMILY GOT AWAY. Before I read US, I read and really, really loved DEAR EVERYBODY. And before I read US, I had purchased but had not yet gotten to HOW MUCH OF US THERE WAS.

Now there’s US: disarmingly simple, gorgeously structured, and as achingly sad a book as I have ever read. I had to stop a couple of times. I really did. The book’s elderly couple—so painfully aware of the fact that one of them is living the last parts of her life—are drawn so concisely, and the situation is so precisely rendered, it was hard not to spend all my time living in it even when I wasn’t reading the book.

Michael and I talked about DEAR EVERYBODY when it came out. When US appeared, we thought it might be nice to talk again.

***

Started your book last night. You are going to break my heart again, aren’t you?

Yes, but in a different way.

Why do our hearts have to break in so many different ways?

It’s one of the surprising things about life, right? When we learn that that can happen.

Or,

I think that it’s partly a structural issue, the heart’s strange shape.

Do you mean the heart’s lack of symmetry? We draw hearts symmetrically, but the real thing just ain’t so. Does it bother us that in the center of each of us is a weirdly shaped, not-even-a-little-bit-graceful ball of muscle?

The actual, physical heart seems misshapen. The four chambers are all different, irregular shapes and the valves, particularly, are not structurally sound. It’s not a coincidence that we locate certain difficult feelings within this uneven structure.

But, then, when we are handed a crayon and asked to put this structure on paper, we give it symmetry. Why are we inclined to do so? The iconic structure—two rounded sides, two pointy seams—is repeated, a meme, but it had to start somewhere, yes? When you write a book, do you long for a structural symmetry in which to store certain difficult feelings?

Isn’t the symmetrical drawing an attempt to cope? In 1st grade, I remember coloring in already-drawn hearts with red crayons. The teacher held up three examples, two good, one bad—a girl’s who colored hers in horizontally and perfectly within the outline, a boy who colored his in vertically and perfectly within the outline, and then mine, which was colored in in every direction and outside the outline. I still think that I had it closer to right than those other examples. And in a book, I think these things need to be uneven too. I don’t think that these difficult feelings can be stored neatly if they are being dealt with in some full sense. That’s part of why the structure of the novel is uneven. The older narrator gets four parts and most of the novel. The younger narrator gets three parts and many fewer pages, but more scope.

So, do you feel like you understood the need to rebel against the “coping through symmetry” strategy immediately? Is this something you have learned over the years? Did you learn it first as a child with a crayon and later as a writer with a pen/typewriter/computer? Gradual learning, or sudden moments punctuated by learning a huge amount quickly?

I don’t think I understood that drive as a kid. I just did it. As my mother would tell you, I was always different, even as a baby. But then I think that I learned myself out of it through school, to fit in, to not get beat up, etc. I came back to it as a young adult, remembered it, remembered how it felt, and it has been specific bits of unexpected insight ever since. I never know when it is going to happen. I just hope to recognize it when it does.

When you do recognize it, do you feel like thanking someone? Anyone? If so, who do you thank?

I feel thankful in general, grateful. I don’t think of thanking somebody particular. I don’t think of thanking even myself. I think that this is because those instances often feel delivered and the deliverer feels unknown—or the delivery system feels unknowable.

[A few days pass]

I read more of the book this weekend, early in the morning. I was up earlier than I wanted to be up. I wanted to sleep, but then I couldn’t. How about you? Did you sleep okay this weekend?

I didn’t have the greatest sleeping weekend. Each morning I was up before I wanted to be up. I also wanted to sleep more, but couldn’t. It makes me think of that scene in E.T. where the older brother is explaining the connection between Elliot and E.T. to one of the scary researchers in white suite: “Elliot feels his feelings.”

There is some blowback, reading a book like US, I think. A book that fears sleep in some ways. What about the blowback writing it? Lasting? Do you have to, at some point, try to pretend you didn’t write it in order to sleep comfortably?

While writing it, definitely, but I’ve become used to that feeling where the brain is kind of vibrating or something. There’s a way to relax into it that allows a person to fall asleep, sometimes. The problem is waking up and being really up. I can never go back to sleep after that. But eventually I did stop thinking about it so much and I could sleep through the night.

Do have some sense of helping cause that sensation in a reader? “I’m a little sorry to do this to you, reader, but I also think you’ll be better for it.” Are we better for it? Are you?

I felt the feeling as a reader when I was writing US. And I don’t want to be presumptuous, but I do feel as if somebody else will feel the feeling if I feel it. And I can say that I am better for it. And I can say that other people have told me that they are better for it, that they didn’t know that they wanted to know but that they are glad they do.

[Many days pass]

I’ve been away a little bit writing, and often when I’m writing, I find it impossible to read. You?

Reading and writing are both such a part of my daily life that it feels awkward for me to not do them both each day, every day. For me, it’s like eating and feeling hungry if you don’t for a while.

I worry they might creep together—what I’ve read and what I’m writing—in a way that would seem untoward to others. Can you talk me out of this? I think I would like to read and write and read and write.

What I was reading used to leak in to my writing, I think, but I think that goes away over time, if what you are doing is practicing at being the writer that only you can be. It’s about being honest with yourself as a writer and we’re on the honor system with that. But based on everything that I’ve read of yours, I think that you can stop worrying about it. The only story that you’re going to write is already yours.

What fed US?

The novel was written out of feelings of loss and grief, but mostly out of love–for my grandparents, who I spent a lot of time with when I was growing up. Instead of method acting, it was a kind of method writing. I wanted the reader to feel what I felt. It was also a way to go back and remember my grandparents, their house, their garden, their car, the way that they talked and moved—and that was a kind of small comfort.

This is an edit of HOW MUCH OF US THERE WAS. What was it like revisiting that book to make this? What prompted you to do it?

I debated whether to even re-read HOW MUCH OF US THERE WAS. I knew that if I re-read it that I would want to make changes. I can’t help it. I asked a few writers about it and everybody advised me not to make changes, to let it be what it has always been, but I couldn’t do it. I felt as if I could make it better. I felt as if I could take the tone of the book a little deeper, make it a little more raw, a little more felt.

It was a strange experience going back to it. The voice got back into my head so quickly even though there were large parts of the novel that I didn’t remember writing. And re-reading it, US made me cry, something that never happened to me while I was writing it.

Why did the title become shorter? I like the old title, but love the new one. It, merely two letters long, is so much sadder. I sort of towers there in front of the book. It’s beautifully lonely.

I always liked the lyricism of HOW MUCH OF US THERE WAS, but it never quite clicked into place for me. As I thought about it, changing the title to Us felt more and more right—not as obviously lyrical, but lyrical nevertheless. Also, I like how US feels unbudgeable and full of implication. And I like the two letters together, which I think of as two people together.

Yeah, that occurred to me, too. The shapes of the letters are interesting, too. The S curve of a woman. The U, a smile without teeth. Like a sad smile. Maybe I’m looking too close.

Is US “better”? Is that even a germane question? Does it mean anything?

I don’t think that we can look too close. It’s a nice way to see different things.

I tried to make US better and I hope that I did. Even if I didn’t, I did make US more of what I wanted it to be. That’s something. It’s a satisfying feeling.

Did US make you better?

Absolutely, it released me in a way, emotionally and aesthetically. I feel lucky to have found a way to write it.

How did you find your way to the ending? (The ending kills me.) How did you discover that it was the last section? How did you know the last sentence was the last sentence?

As I was writing the last part, I knew it was the last part. I knew that it had to end with the older narrator’s voice and it felt right having that voice begin and end the voice. I didn’t know that I was writing the last chapter, though. I thought that I had maybe another thirty or forty pages in front of me. I didn’t realize that I had reached the end until the moment that I reached the end. I still remember sitting there in my desk chair, looking at the computer screen. I said something to myself, something like: “Oh, so that’s the ending.” I was surprised and I feel it in my chest. I knew that voice didn’t have anything else to say.

When do you think this interview ends?

I should say something funny right here, right?

Possibly. Maybe not, though. Maybe the interview just stops.

Or maybe it keeps going. The book exists today. How do you feel?

I’ll just go with earnest then: I love this book more than any of my other books and I’m really happy that it exists now in America.

Me, too, Michael.

Us from Michael Kimball on Vimeo.

This is one of like three books ever that made me cry. I read it in a bathtub, all in one go. It is essentially the story of a old man losing his wife to sickness, but rendered in a way that only Michael Kimball knows. You should find out.

Shipping now from Tyrant Books.

Today’s some made-up holiday, which means places are closed, so to celebrate, here‘s a new story by Nick Mamatas. It’s a weird little ditty with lols a-plenty, I mean, if you like that kind of stuff, laughing, I mean, out loud.

And here, Johannes Goransson says a metaphor to explain his vision of an ideal poem is an “infestation of language.” I like that.

And here, Michael Kimball says he likes pizza and ice cream. I like pizza and ice cream too.

And, just for holiday kicks, she got married yesterday, and seriously, the big story is about her dress.

And that’s all I have to say.

HAHAHAHAHA:

Dear Sara,
I’m sorry I came back to life and ate you and your new husband, Carl. It’s just that I can’t stop eating people. I suppose it isn’t all my fault, though. You should have known that I would be a fast zombie, after how good I was at track. Anyway, I have to go now because I hear there are some humans hiding out in the mall. Hey, maybe I’ll see you there?

Dear Dad,
Thanks for being so terrible all my life. Now I have something to be undead for. That’s right, something’s been gnawing at me, and pretty soon it’s going to be gnawing on you, too.

Dear What’s-Your-Face that I hit with my lunchbox,
I don’t care if it looked mean inside your head. All that blood must have been delicious.

Also see: How Much Of Us There Was to Eat, in which the grandmother pulls through . . . or does she?

Through tomorrow you can get Devine’s Words for $8 from PG here.

Consider checking out their work, here and here.