Amanda Earl : 2025 VERSeFest interviews: Zoe Whittall

 

Zoe Whittall is a bestselling novelist and TV writer. Her novel The Best Kind of People was a finalist for the Giller prize and named Indigo’s #1 book of the year. The New York Times called her fourth novel The Spectacular “a highly readable testament to the strength of the maternal bond” and The Toronto Star called it “a singularly impressive piece of fiction.” She won a Lamda literary award for her second novel Holding Still for as Long as Possible, and the Writers Trust Dayne Ogilvie prize for her debut, Bottle Rocket Hearts. She won a Canadian Screen Award as part of the writing team for The Baroness Von Sketch Show. Her latest books are No Credit River (poetry/memoir), Wild Failure (short fiction), and The Fake (a novel). She lives in Prince Edward County, Ontario.

Zoe Whittall reads in Ottawa on Friday, March 28 as part of VERSeFest 2025.

Amanda Earl: In Ars Poetica, you mention that you read everything labelled autofiction, and you are drawn to autofiction as an alienated truth. You say it permits stories without villains. Were you consciously reading autofiction to try to figure out the rules or conventions? Can you talk about why the idea of an “alienated truth” was attractive or generative to you?

Zoe Whittall: I love autofiction mostly because I love style, voice, language, and character more than I like plot. I like a tightly plot driven TV show, I love a meandering thought bubble of a book. Give me a slim volume about a girl sitting in bed thinking about her philosophies or feelings and I’m all over it. But part of what I love about it is its implicit unreliability, and the sort of gossip-y or fake closeness of feeling as though you’re sitting beside the author when they’re at their weirdest and they’re telling you secrets. But no one is ever really telling you secrets. They’re offering you a sculpture, highly cultivated, polished and chipped away at, that only looks raw or like it has an organic, improvised quality. Every word, phrase, moment, in any good book is deliberate. If it was just blurted out and messy it would be like when you look at a bad painting but you don’t know why it's bad but you know it somehow. And the secret is that the composition is off balance. But I love the lie of autofiction. It feels close to what I like about the new narrative movement which was this raw, circular, rule-breaking literature that was often about sex and oblivion and queerness with these unwieldy and wild sentences that felt like you were just reading someone’s scrawled vulnerabilities. So alienated truth was the most concise way I felt I could describe what I think the best kind of hybrid, personal texts can aim for.

AE: Creative nonfiction and memoir have overlapping qualities. This book is described also as a memoir in prose poetry. Can you talk about your experiences in trying to label this work?

ZW: Ok so here is where I confess that I assumed creative non-fiction and memoir were one and the same? Is the difference that CNF can be more creative – i.e., loose with the facts and more story-like? It started as a book of mostly prose poems, and the more I worked on it the more I started to see a book length narrative arc. And then I started to think about the confessional element and how I might be able to be more overt about it.

AE: In your Ex-Puritan interview with Kailey Havelock about your novel The Best Kind of People, you write “I used to feel more comfortable in first person, and sometimes I still do.” Now you are using first person and writing something that is so clearly about personal experience. How did you get more comfortable with writing in first?

ZW: I feel comfortable in first and third for different reasons. Both have an intimacy that you can’t get with the other. Sustaining first for an entire novel is difficult in terms of the constraint of what you can know, but it is also roomy and had a depth you can’t always get in the same way with third. I like them both.

AE: This book is so readable, relatable, funny, biting, and raw with self-deprecating humour. As a comedy writer, I imagine you hone your craft for timing and knowing what is humorous for an audience. In the book, did you have to try to be humorous or is this just how you are? Can you edit humour or is it something that just has to flow naturally?

ZW: It's something that comes naturally to me whenever I’m wrestling with an idea or how to think about something. Certainly it’s a defense mechanism and also how I understand the world. I’ve also been working as a comedy writer for TV and crafting jokes while also writing books for about ten years now, so the instinct is hard to turn off. I definitely edit humor the same way I would any sentence, for rhythm and pay off and I think about how long a line is and whether or not the joke is too quick or too long.

AE: One of the areas of the book which impressed me was the constant engagement with its form, the metatextuality of it. You refer to it as a “book of ideas” (4) and “A poem is four hundred years of lesbian gossip” (10). You say that “form is content” (15). Content can be both the substance of a work and a state of mind. The form here troubles or queers the journal/memoir/poetic form by playing with it, such as you do in the prose pantoum (20) or by using techniques such as imagery and repetition which hybridizes prose and poetry. You mention Dodie Bellamy and the New Narrative and mention that you were inspired by it? Can you give some examples of how it inspired you? Did it help you tackle ways in which to approach an unreliable memoir, for example?

ZW: I was thinking about something Dodie Bellamy said in an interview about how the new narrative movement was big on telling not showing. I think that unlocked something in me while writing this book, to stop being afraid of defining the genre and being fixed in any which way. I was, am, very influenced by that worlde of mostly queer avant garde writers who were unafraid to break with the conventions of the time, who wrote about shame with humor, sexuality, and dying – very much influenced by aids and the conservatism of the 80s, I imagine. The kind of confessional zine era I started writing in, those movements were in conversation with each other. New narrative writers were so daring on the page with what looked like confession but was highly artful and audacious, using real names and real events, but twisting and subverting it all. I returned to Kathy Acker and Gary Indiana and Gail Scott while writing the book, I was looking for permission to really go wild after a few years of writing fairly conventional novels, form-wise.

AE: There are vivid details in the book. Is writing a journal or diary part of your everyday practice or something you did to work on this book?

ZW: I journalled obsessively in my younger years but I haven’t been consistent about it in a long time. So some of the details I’m looking back on are from photographs or are just particularly memorable, others start as a sensory detail from a journal and then I expand on them or make them more stark or interesting.

AE: What is it like to read the book to an audience? Are there certain parts that you don’t read or wish to avoid reading? Are you surprised at what people laugh at?

ZW: I mostly read from the ars poetica and any of the poems with humor because they work better out loud. Especially since I started writing for comedy shows and doing some stand-up, I’m most comfortable if I can make at least a few people in the audience laugh. There are certainly poems I don’t think would work from the stage.

AE: In some ways, the book could be a handbook for the broken-hearted, especially in its reference to transmasculine and femme butch relationships, which as you mention is rare. I love the idea of writing the book you wish to see in the world. I feel like this is a book I wish to see in the world, including the wisdom you share and its hybridity. I am grateful to you for sharing your grief, your heartbreak and your experiences as a writer. Do you think you will play with this unreliable memoir, prose poem format again? How does it compare to writing fiction for you?

ZW: Thank you! I will definitely write more prose poetry. I love the form. I love a long line and small stories pushing up against imagery and comedy and fragments. I’m not sure if I’ll ever be explicit about writing memoir again. Depends on what happens in my life, I suppose?

AE: Can you achieve an objective distance from your writing at the editing stage when you so closely write about grief and heartbreak?

ZW: I think so, or you can close to it. And then you have the gift of an objective editor who can remind you what is artful or what the interesting idea might be that you’re wrestling with, and then what is the diary stuff that can be cut to make the work better and real.

AE: You mention that your ex will hate the book but will never read it (51). Did you feel you had to be careful in how you depicted him in the book?

ZW: Yes. The book is about me and my grief process, I offer very few specific details about him and I did that on purpose bc it felt like the ethical thing to do. As a reader I love the gore of gossip and confession but as a writer I can’t help but always think of the real people I love and have loved and their feelings.

AE: “There’s the way I live and the way I want to live.” I feel like this could be a refrain for queer people and their lives, that feeling of having to fit into some concept of heteronormativity that is shoved down our throats through film, tv, etc. Do you find models for the way you want to live in art, literature and film and do they act as solace or reassurance? Today, given the rise of homophobia and transphobia and removal of rights, especially in the USA, do you feel like your work might help queer and trans people feel less alone?

ZW: I’m not sure. I’ve certainly heard from a lot of readers so far who have felt seen in terms of the specific kind of heartbreak devastation that can happen when you end a relationship with someone who was very push-and-pull emotionally, where you feel caught in a kind of addictive cycle. It’s a strange, surreal kind of dynamic, not quite like regular heartbreak or grief because there is an added feeling of such utter confusion for which way is up or down. The line about the way I live and the way I want to live was for me about the things you say and believe about who you are in relationship and how you’re getting by, and then the truth of those most sorrowful moments.

The rise of transphobia right now is so terrifying. I feel like I can’t even make sense of how bad it is getting every day. I feel like we have to prepare for war and I’m not being an hysterical leftist overstating harm, I really do feel like it’s a new era and I’m very scared.

AE: I appreciated your inclusion of the details of the literary life: awards, artist retreats, toxic CanLit, struggles to write, responses to fan mail, etc.

ZW: I couldn’t write about the last ten years of my life without mentioning the strangeness of life as a full time writer within this particular world of Can Lit. So many things happened all at once, and it was a very exciting time but in some ways any artist’s career has extreme ups and downs. It mirrored the relationship in a way. So there was chaos everywhere. And I dislike reading memoir by artists where they leave out the day to day practical details of being an artist.

AE: “I can’t choose safety as an artist…” (71) Did writing and publishing this work help you work through your grief and heartbreak and did it make you feel unsafe? How do you cope with such feelings?

ZW: I’m not sure if it helped me cope, but it did help to write a story of it all.

AE: “My feelings were so big I was stumbling through our life together, a messy chaos monster.” (51) I think a lot of people will relate to this book and I appreciate your sharing your stumbles. Thank you for writing no credit river and for being willing to be open about your experiences.

ZW: Thank you, Amanda! Looking forward to seeing you in Ottawa.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Amanda Earl (she/her) is a writer, editor, mentor, reviewer, publisher, living on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg Peoples. Hire her as an editor or literary event organizer. Her latest book is Beast Body Epic, a collection of near-death long poems. More info: AmandaEarl.com. Linktr.ee/AmandaEarl

Shikha Malaviya : Process Note 29

The ‘process notes’ pieces were originally solicited by Maw Shein Win as addendum to her teaching particular poems and poetry collections for various workshops and classes. This process note and poetry by Shikha Malaviya are part of her curriculum for her class at the University of San Francisco in their MFA in Writing Program.

     In 2017, I chanced upon a photograph that would alter the course of my writing life for the next five years, resulting in a book of historical persona poetry on India’s first female medical doctor, Anandibai Joshee: A Life in Poems (HarperCollins India, July 2023). At the time, I was researching South Asian American history for a long lyric poem project inspired by the racism I had experienced while growing up in the midwest in the ‘80s. In this project, one of my goals was to confront my childhood bullies with historical facts about immigrants from South Asia, to prove to them that my family was one of many that had come from India to live in the United States over the years. I wanted to render my bullies' words, ‘go back where you came from’, obsolete. I set out to find who was the first woman from India to touch American shores by doing an internet search. Within a few seconds, I found myself staring at a sepia-tinted photograph that left me almost breathless. Three young women stared back at me with intensity and purpose, the leftmost one dressed elegantly in a saree, the middle woman in a kimono, and the rightmost one wearing a headdress of coins. The inscription below the photograph indicated that these three women, Anandibai Joshee, Kei Okami and Sabat Islambooly were doctors who had come to Philadelphia from India, Japan, and Syria in the 19th century and were the first women from their respective countries to study medicine in the United States. As the Indian doctor’s Monalisa-like glance followed me everywhere, I wondered who this woman was and how she got to Philadelphia from India in the 19th century? How did she manage to break the shackles of tradition where women were largely homebound tending to family and manage to cross ‘kala pani,’ those black ocean waters that were considered poisonous/tainted? I literally felt a shiver of acknowledgment, this validation of knowing that there actually had been others before us. I immediately saved the image of the photograph on my laptop, knowing I would return to it and somehow write about it. Little did I know that this very photograph would spur a whole biography in poetry as well as become one of my most challenging poetry prompts.

     I had written several poems on Anandibai’s life, before I approached writing a poem based on the very photograph that started it all. I knew this ekphrastic poem had to be in the book, but I didn’t quite know how. Because this photograph was the catalyst, I wanted the poem in response to it to be special. I first thought of approaching it in terms of an invocation and having the poem at the very beginning of the book.

FIRST ATTEMPT/VERSION:

GODDESSES OF THE SERPENT & STAFF: AN INVOCATION

Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, 1886 / World Wide Web, 2017

A triumvirate of another kind 
we circumambulate the world
in a new century 

where longitude and latitude 
collapse into a tangled web
and we are surfing high

goddesses of the serpent and staff
not Durga Lakshmi Saraswati
but Joshi Okami Islambooly

stethoscopes tucked under
a saree a kimono a headdress of coins
viewing the modern world with sepia glances

and like a lottery ticket to the past
you scratch to see what’s underneath
to see if the numbers match

what you’ve won is palimpsest
a story over a story over a story 
you show me yours, I’ll show you mine

I’m the smallest of them all
wrapped in six yards of silk 
my kunku a tiny third eye 

consumption hidden behind
a hint of a smile on my lips
as my eyes follow you

like a Mahratta Mona Lisa
pulling you into my life
turbulent like kala pani

     While this wasn’t necessarily a bad poem, I felt it was revealing too much at the beginning and that I was sort of directing what I wanted the readers to feel. A poet friend had told me to add myself into the narrative, my connection to my subject, and this was my clumsy attempt. Not every reader might feel they had won a lottery ticket to the past by looking at this photograph and that these three doctors were goddesses. This first draft felt like I was trying too hard and ultimately, I wanted to focus on the feelings of those who were in the photograph. My voice did not belong here. I felt the pressure of conveying the importance of this photograph and my own feelings and responses were interfering with the creative process. I decided to put writing this poem on hold and revisit it in a few months. 

SECOND/THIRD ATTEMPTS:

     I had started arranging the other poems of Anandibai’s life I had written chronologically and felt that this poem should be placed chronologically as well. While writing another poem, I started wondering how Anandibai and her other two classmates must have felt while having their photograph taken. Were they the only three international students? My guess was yes. Were they asked to come dressed in their native clothes? Perhaps. Who took the photograph? Surely it must have been a white man as photography was considered a male profession at the time. And if so, what did that imply? I tried writing a poem from the point of view of the white, male photographer and came up with the following lines:

My wife will want to know where such fine silk is found
I think as I tell them to face the camera 
this triad of doctors, ladies of the orient, bound by a continent 
and yet how different they are 
from left to right, a saree, a kimono, a headdress of coins 
three years in Philadelphia and soon they will don white coats 
and is it cold where you come from I want to ask 

And when that didn’t seem right, I decided first person would be best:

Look straight ahead, the photographer says 
and we do, facing the camera in our fancy dress
a saree a kimono a headdress of coins
glad to be rid of our medical attire 
but for this brief hour, where we pose—
it doesn’t occur to us that we are a triad 
of otherness—India, Tokyo, Syria
who all crossed the same oceans
doctors in training
bound by a common continent

     The poem was finally moving in the right direction, but like the photo, I wanted it to have an immediate impact and what I had come up with seemed too wordy and explanatory. And also the fact that I mentioned that they didn’t think of themselves as the other. They surely must have. It was around this time that I came across Jericho Brown’s powerful book of poems, The Tradition, and within that the duplex form. I was dazzled by how this form of poetry, that combined the sonnet, ghazal, and blues, could provide a framework within 14 lines that embraced the musicality of repetition with the structure of couplets. As well as brevity. I wondered what would happen if I used the duplex form for my own poem. The result, below, I am thrilled to share, is what ended up in the book. I used to be very resistant to form, but in the writing of this book, I often turned to form because it gave me a much-needed frame, bringing things into more focus.

FINAL VERSION:

WHEN THEY ASK US TO POSE FOR A PHOTOGRAPH AT THE WOMEN’S MEDICAL COLLEGE RECEPTION

Philadelphia, 1885 

 

Forgive us if we don’t smile
the ocean’s scent still on our clothes

still on our clothes the stench of sea
we, visitors of another clime

of warmer lands are we
with pride, we wear our native clothes

silks and jewels we proudly don
saree, kimono, headdress of coins

with lyre, sash, a handheld fan
no scalpel, stethoscope or degree 

three female doctors of foreign pedigree  
playing dress-up for Western eyes 

in our appearance, they see worlds wild
forgive us if we don’t smile

 

From Anandibai Joshee: A Life in Poems, HarperCollins India, 2023.

Shikha Malaviya is a poet, writer, and publisher. Her book of historical persona poetry, Anandibai Joshee: A Life in Poems (HarperCollins, India, 2023) is a unique retelling of the life of India's first female medical doctor and the first Indian woman to study medicine in the United States. Shikha’s previous book of poems, Geography of Tongues, was published to acclaim in 2014. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and featured in Catamaran, PLUME, Prairie Schooner and other fine publications. Shikha has been a featured TEDx speaker and was selected as Poet Laureate of San Ramon, California, 2016. Shikha is co-founder of The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, a mentorship-model literary press and is currently a Mosaic America Fellow. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area with her family, where she is a poetry mentor, publisher, and workshop facilitator.

www.shikhamalaviya.com

Author of Anandibai Joshee: A Life in Poems 
(HarperCollins India, 2023) & Geography of Tongues

Poems & essay in Commonplace
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Maw Shein Win’s most recent poetry collection is Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn) which was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for the PEN America Open Book Award, and shortlisted for CALIBA’s Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. Win's previous collections include Invisible Gifts (Manic D Press) and two chapbooks: Ruins of a glittering palace (SPA) and Score and Bone (Nomadic Press). Win’s Process Note Series features poets and their process. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA and teaches poetry in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco. Win often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers and was recently selected as a 2023 YBCA 100 Honoree. Along with Dawn Angelicca Barcelona and Mary Volmer, she is a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse, a new literary community. mawsheinwin.com