‘Troubling the situation’: An Interview with Michelle Butler Hallett

By Jeff Bursey  

Michelle and I met in December 1989, and have been encouraging each other as writers ever since. We had this email conversation in the fall of 2011, and added to it in March 2014.

Michelle Butler Hallett is the author of The shadow side of grace (2006, Killick Press), Double-blind (2007, Killick Press; shortlisted for the Sunburst Award), Sky Waves (2008, Killick Press), and deluded your sailors (2011, Killick Press). Michael Crummey described her first book like this: “a rare debut, a collection that takes more risks than some writers take in a lifetime.”

What’s your latest novel about, and how does it differ from your other work? Are there some points of contact?

Deluded your sailors is about how we preserve and present the past—how we understand history and stories. It’s about freedom. It’s also about struggles to heal, or at least to live with some view to morality after great pain. Part of that struggle is looking hard at what wounded you, and how you’ve wounded others, often while suffering continues.

I think I’ve been writing about that struggle from the start, with the Keefer Breen short story “The mercy of his means” in The shadow side of grace. Many of my characters face this struggle, and some take it up, with varying results. Recognition is a key: recognizing (not realizing) just what’s been done, by whom, when, and, possibly, why. Recognition involves deep empathy, I think, and that can be a very frightening journey to take.

Deluded your sailors is your fourth book. For readers who may not have heard about them, can you sum up each of the other three books?

The shadow side of grace is a collection of short stories that looks at power and the complexities of goodness. Double-blind is a novel narrated in the first-person by a psychiatrist working under MK-ULTRA protocol who does not consider himself a monster. Sky Waves examines our need to communicate, and commune, with one another and with something greater—and also our fear of doing that.

You often write about disturbing things: mental distress, physical punishment, coercion in its most unpleasant forms, violence, depression. How do you research these things?

I read a fair bit of non-fiction, mostly history. I read blogs and forums. I try to listen to people, especially outcasts, whether made so by their own actions or by those of others, at once trying to accept them and trying to imagine being them in a difficult situation. I believe that we have good in us, that it can triumph—though not without a struggle, sometimes a fierce one. Love enters here.

Personally, I’ve had more experience with cold and manipulative people than I care for, and I deal with bouts of clinical depression.

Is writing about an abuse victim or survivor—which term do you favour?—cathartic for you?

If it were cathartic, I’d stop, I think. I have felt great rage—sometimes it frightens me—and I can channel it into such work. But the rage, and the sorrow, builds again when I look around. I try not to scream . . .  instead, I try to tell stories. Not just to sneak in screams of rage, but to look at questions of good and evil. Look intimately.

Then there are questions—for my characters, and for real people—of healing, the moments when you might wonder, how has this experience shaped me? How has it made me more, or less, human? Am I more compassionate to others or have I shut down? If I’ve not shut down but instead decided to risk opening up to others again, decided to risk caring, how I do go about it? Then you might ask, has this horrible thing been good for me in some way? That tangle, that big knot of a question mark—the mystery of suffering—compels me.

I have no stand on whether to use “victim” or “survivor.” The wound is not the person.

One thing prevalent in your work is illness. What attracts you to writing about the body in general, whether tattoos or some condition a character might have?

I was a bit of a sickly child. I was also overweight and rotten at sports, and I felt ugly and shameful from a young age—in a society where a girl and a woman’s worth is still measured first and foremost by her appearance—so on some level I’ve long considered my body a fleshy talisman of failure. Around the age of ten I got interested in biology and medicine and thought I might become a doctor, but at sixteen I changed my mind, because I was afraid I was too interested in the manifestation of disease and would ignore the human being, the suffering person. But I devoured biology textbooks and medical books written for the layman. My own illnesses, hard to pin down when I was younger, came and went like fogs, making me wonder, in their absence, if they’d even existed. Around the age of twenty I showed signs of an autoimmune arthritis that eventually forced me to use a cane. I had some GI troubles in the early 2000s, resulting in several hospitalizations and some hard pain. The utter change of being sick, of suddenly relying on people to bring you food and medicine, of just lying there counting the minutes between injections and naps, too sick even to read, hoping to sleep—that was instructive. I learned about frailty. Not just physical frailty, either, but how delicate our untended minds and hearts can be. I think illness, hospitals and the frailties and comedies of flesh in my work are about being human, in all its beauty and mess, about facing the hard questions of what our existence might mean, and about starting to recognize there may be more to sentient creation than humanity.

While I’ve got some tattoos, I don’t think I’ve written about tattoos much, except to mention them on the arm of a Holocaust survivor in Double-blind (her music teacher sees it when she plays) and on the arms of Royal Navy and World War Two veteran Dick Harnum in the poem “Demobilized.” Rose Fahey in the story “Trail marks” and in Sky Waves has old burn scalds on her arms.

I like tattoos—those gotten willingly, I mean. I’ve promised myself new ink for each book contract. Human skin is at once tough and delicate. Tattoos hurt, and there’s something strange to the easeful Western mind about a willing submission to permanent marks that make you wince and bleed. Then there are the ritual-like aspects of it. There may be endorphins; I don’t know. I definitely feel pain with it—if wasps could sting with razors, over and over like that. When I stood up from getting the work on my upper chest, I was so pale you could practically see right through my head, except for the dozens of freckles that got in the way. Back to the tangle again: beauty, suffering and meaning as inseparable.

In addition to writing about characters that are defeated or beaten up by life, you also write about those who do the beating and manipulating. Yet they themselves are often screwed by the system they work in, or by a personality trait. Maybe your books are a form of hell? Do you ever want to write something that is cheerful?

I’ve always liked Augustine’s idea that hell is distance from God. This idea turns up in the Bahá’í Faith as well, that hell is not a destination but a state of the soul. It’s a heavy idea. Mephistopheles in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus sums it up beautifully when he is summoned out of the fire and into a study: “Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.”

Many of my characters are caught in a tyranny, and they mimic the abuse that’s been visited on them, abuse and manipulate others to save themselves, or at least delay their own pain. Nichole Wright in Sky Waves compares it to colonization.

My characters are often beaten up, yes, but how many are truly defeated? How many are truly living without some spark of hope? Some of them don’t see that spark, true, but it’s often there.

My work is not uniformly hopeless. Dark, yes—often. I’ve experienced darkness. So have many others. I can’t just ignore that. Double-blind and some of the stories in The shadow side of grace end on notes of despair; I think denying despair is as dangerous as wallowing in it. But “obliged to drink bad water” in The shadow side of grace and Sky Waves end on at least tentative up notes, and I think there’s comedy and hope in deluded your sailors. And where there’s despair, there’s often mystery as well.

Many situations have no discernible escape, and end badly. Someone tied to a chair can’t get up. Someone caged cannot walk away. A woman beaten to death by an abusive partner stayed because she believed there was no alternative. This may not necessarily be a fact, but it is what she believed. For characters where there seems no sign of escape, I’d ask you to look at the narrative strategy first. What do the characters believe at that point, and why? Sometimes, yes, there is no escape—this, to my mind, is part of the mystery of suffering. This recognition is also what compels me to write about the tyrants, the abusers: at what point could they have turned back, and why didn’t they?

Do I ever want to write something that is cheerful? Just the one note, you mean, nothing else? Not for the sole sake of doing so, no. Do I like comedy? Love it. Do I write comically? No, but increasingly there’s comedy tangled up with the sadness in my work. Being human is often funny, absurdly so. Comedy, tragedy or somewhere in between: for me a story’s got to have conflict.

Also . . . I do not feel in control of where my characters go or what choices they make. At some point in the creative process, my characters get all rubbery and mouthy, and they tell me what’s up, what they’re doing, and why. I can see times where they could choose something else that would change the story, change the ending, but for me to go in and force them to make that choice feels dishonest. My characters are not my pawns or agents. I surrender to them. This goes back to the tangle I mentioned earlier: I want my story endings to feel inevitable, even though the characters had free will at every step along the way. Each choice matters.

Journeys toward happiness begin in my work. What interests me is the journey itself and the myriad conflicts on the way. Happiness is often a stake in those conflicts.

I know deluded your sailors started out as a very different book. Tell me about its original form, and how it changed.

To answer that, I need to tell you that deluded your sailors has three parts: “Acts of Folly,” “Acts of Fever” and “Acts of Faith.” “Folly” and “Faith” take place in 2009; “Fever” runs from 1718-34.

I got the seed for what is now “Acts of Fever” back in 1990 when I heard Kate Bush’s version of the song “The Handsome Cabin Boy.” I immediately knew I wanted to—needed to—write a girl-disguised-as-a-boy-and-something-dreadful-happens-that-changes-her story. I did not know why. As I knew absolutely nothing about life at sea, or about the eighteenth century, I had years of research to do. I arsed around with the story off and on for years, trying to figure out how to narrate it, failing and failing. The character John Cannard, who narrates part of deluded your sailors, started as a spinoff.

I worked on the project as a stand-alone, under a different title, “Dead Reckoning,” during a correspondence course through Humber College’s School for Writers. I made a meaningless mess of it, but I learned a lot. After the Humber work, I got two publication offers for different versions of “Dead Reckoning,” but I declined, because the writing sucked and I really hoped I could do better. And it didn’t feel whole. Then, after I’d finished Sky Waves and was working on some short plays and stories, I saw what “Acts of Fever” was actually about, saw how I might frame and support it with a twenty-first-century storyline in “Acts of Folly” and “Acts of Faith.” Nichole Wright, Evan Rideout, Gabriel Furey and Seth Seabright, the mains in the twenty-first-century storyline, started to talk to me—talk and talk and talk. I fought parts of the 2009 storyline for a while; some of the characters’ experiences veered close to those of friends or myself. And I don’t want to get into irksome questions of “Is this autobiographical?” or “Is this a roman à clef?” (The answer to both questions is no.) Nichole and Gabriel had already appeared and developed somewhat in Sky Waves. Seth and Evan are new. Other characters from Sky Waves recur and develop further in deluded your sailors, and that’s fine, because I want to build an interconnected world with my fiction.

You write in a way that doesn’t attract the conventional reader. Tell me why you write the way you do, and if this is the way you’ve always written. How would you like to advance as a writer?

Who is the conventional reader?

Sometimes I’ll think, such-and-such a friend might like this, and I may work with that friend in mind. More often I just focus on the story. I think. My work has always been strange, and I’ve always been attracted to stories of outcasts. I don’t always understand it, particularly not as I’m working.

I guess it comes down in part to not thinking in a linear manner. I think associatively, which, I know,         can make some of what I say and write seem very strange, even nonsensical. I don’t know if I’m quite in McLuhan territory here, medium is the message, but I do think a unity of form and meaning matters.

I’ve written in a linear manner many times. All the stories in The shadow side of grace, except for “obliged to drink bad water,” are linear. So is Double-blind. As I said earlier, how I put together a story will depend on the story’s needs.

As for what advance I’d like to make . . . wow, an advance cheque? Do those things still exist? I’ve heard stories . . .

I want to make my characters richer. That means I need to study people more. With that will come, I hope, richer stories.

In the end, I want my body of work to be one long prayer.

You’re a Bahá’í. Does this inform the writing?

One of the aspects of the Bahá’í Faith is the idea that suffering is a gift, that suffering purifies you, as fire purifies gold. This is not a new idea, and it is certainly not exclusive to Bahá’ís. I mention it because I’ve mentioned suffering several times now, and because I’m just seeing how faith, long before I counted myself a Bahá’í, has been slowly infusing my work. What attracted me to the Bahá’í Faith was how many of the ideals were ones I cherished already—equality of men and women, oneness of humanity, justice—but also certain teachings that answered the arrogant alleged intellectual in me. The unity of religion and science, for example. And progressive revelation. Bahá’ís see human existence as a journey towards God and this world as a womb for the soul.

Another major idea from the Bahá’í Faith that is shot through my stories is that evil is not a thing in and of itself but an absence—an absence of good, of compassion and empathy, as darkness is an absence of light.

I first heard of the Bahá’í Faith when Mona Mahmudnizhad was hanged, along with nine other Bahá’í women, in Shiraz, Iran, in 1983. I was only twelve, but I reeled at the thought: who on earth is willing to suffer and die for a religion these days? In the twentieth century? Mahmudnizhad and the other women received bastinado with a cable and endured various deprivations before death. They did not recant. The women were hanged in a polo field. Mona Mahmudnizhad was the youngest, at about eighteen.

Sacred ordeals in the time of Pac-Man.

I never forgot her.

Your first book is called The shadow side of grace. What does grace mean there? It isn’t a Calvinist form of grace, I’m thinking. And, is that grace present in the other books?

One of the reasons I gave the collection that title is that I do not know, or understand, what grace is.         But I’ve observed it, usually in the context of suffering, some painful journey. Grace, as I’ve seen it, does not come lightly or gently, and sometimes it seems at first to magnify the suffering. My dim comprehension of grace is tangled up with ideas of mercy, of God’s presence in our existence, and of feeling there are powers perhaps much greater than our own influencing (not controlling) our lives. And yes, it is all over my work. It does not necessarily rescue a character from difficulty, but it’s there.

The Globe and Mail reviewed Double-Blind as a crime novel, and it was up for a science fiction award. What allegiance do you have to isms or genres?

Yeah, the crime novel thing was funny, though it pissed me off at the time. I got a smack in the face from truth on that one. My novel, which I’d worked so hard on and bled for, blah blah blah, get out the hankies till we have a weep, was just another product on someone’s overflowing desk that needed to be slotted in somewhere. One acquaintance told me I should have been grateful to be reviewed in the Globe and Mail at all, even if they did totally misunderstand my work and discuss it in one paragraph. I’m not so sure about that. It wasn’t a great review, naturally, because Double-blind does not conform to expectations of a crime novel.

Which is not to say I despise crime novels, or espionage novels, just because of their label. A good novel is a good novel. I really like the work of Ian Rankin and John LeCarré. Both are often dismissed (not LeCarré so much anymore) as mere genre novelists, as hacks who rely on a formula and churn out the pulp every eighteen months or so. I argue that so-called literary fiction can be just as much a hidebound genre spiked with predictable tropes as any other kind of fiction. The marketing label is not what matters. A story labelled ‘literary’ is not guaranteed to be good.

I just want to write the story honestly. If that means I need something “paranormal” or “supernatural” as happens in my work, then I’ll use it. If I need a scary landscape and a bitter winter, I’ll use them. Reality is a slippery concept, at best, often quite subjective.

How much of what you write is based on form? That is, do you write until you see a form, or do you conceive of a form and then write?

Increasingly, I find each piece needs the form and structure that suits it best, not necessarily the form I’d hoped to use. But form cannot be too rigid. So I guess form, for me, in some rough     understanding, grows alongside story and intertwines with it. Sky Waves is probably the most blatant example of this. I tried to weave ninety-eight non-linear chapters together by theme and character and still tell a story that moves forward and develops, even as it darts backward in time. Given what’s happening in that novel—many characters, long timeline, development of radio and television as mass media, the physics of radio, suppression of voices and the shattering of truth—this form is appropriate. Similarly, “obliged to drink bad water” progresses with three storylines, but there it’s always the same or a similar date in each timeline, and it remains linear.

It’s risky. A story needs a meaningful structure, but I don’t want the structure to trump the story. And story is not necessarily the same thing as plot.

You produced four books in about six years. You contribute to anthologies, write plays and poetry. Do you see yourself, because of your illnesses, as writing against time? Against death?

Yes, I think my hospitalizations, and the relative speed of the illnesses that have put me there, have given me a shock, as have the unexpected cancer deaths of two people for whom I deeply cared. In October 2009 I got admitted for severe pain in my hips, shortly after X-rays had turned up lesions that looked lytic and malignant. The lesions were benign; they’re called fibrous dysplasias and were just a coincidence. Waiting for those results, and feeling some of the worst pain of my life—and I’ve given birth twice—I spun like I was drowning. I have two daughters; they were eleven and eight; all I could think was how could I leave them, abandon them, with so much undone? It would have been out of my hands, of course—and I’m very curious about what comes after this life—but that they, so young, might have had to watch me die—horrifying thought. This scare changed me. I no longer hide affection, risky as that gets. I reach out. I love. I sometimes make a fool of myself, doing so. That’s all spilling into my work.

Even before getting sick, or watching sickness ravage others, I wrote a lot. It’s deeply pleasurable, even when I’m fucking up a story beyond repair. There’s purpose and a sense of tapping into something vital.

As for being called prolific—I don’t think I am, not really. It’s been over three years since I published a book. I am blessed with lots of ideas, and I do love to write, hard as it can get. Some of my habits come from working in radio, where I wrote advertising and promotional copy to deadline and demand. I used to rise early in the mornings and work on my own material, and I had no choice but to focus hard in those two precious hours. Being a mother also shapes that; you take what scant free time you get and you use it, no fooling around. I get irritable if I can’t write, so I write a lot.

To a reader approaching you for the very first time by reading deluded your sailors, what might they take away from it?

I have no idea what effect deluded your sailors might have on anyone who reads it.

Writing deluded your sailors had a lot to do with facing fears, learning to detach from fears, and persevering. Fuck. I’m just seeing it now. Not just the stories in it—I mean, working to put them       together—it was all about faith, wasn’t it?

CODA, March 2014:

Time has passed since deluded your sailors appeared, and I’d like to bring up something best exemplified by two notices of the novel. Hopefully it won’t raise hackles.

The Quill & Quire reviewer commented that your book “[demands] a level of attentiveness that will give many readers pause.” On a blog, someone else gently chastised you with these words: “I couldn’t help feeling that the way in which the story was told distanced the reader a little. The reservations I had about the book may simply come down to a case of the writer trying to pack too much into the book… While I’m all in favour of authors making readers work a little, there’s a delicate balance to be struck there.”

Do you think that there’s a level of richness you aim for, and a demand from the reader for his attention, that can exceed what readers, or consumers (an increasingly blurred category), in Canada are willing to experience or to give? Does it seem to you that Canadian writers are expecting less from audiences and therefore are offering or attempting less?

Richness. I like that. I want my work to be rich. I enjoy stories, novels, and movies that reveal something new to me each time I visit them. How dull, how thin a novel would be if you could pick up everything on the first reading.

I don’t set out to demand anything. I can see someone complaining that Sky Waves is hard to get into—“it’s not very welcoming,” one person told me face-to-face—but deluded your sailors is much more straightforward, I thought. I tried to give it some cross-weaving in the image patterns and with that the thematic development. If a reader finds one of my novels too difficult, then the reader is free to put it down. Some of this is the form issue we discussed earlier, how I want form and story to be one. Some of it puzzles me. I can think of many writers whose work has influenced me, and whose fiction is harder to crack, and much better, than mine: William Gaddis, Franz Kafka, Herman Melville, Flannery O’Connor … almost all men, it turns out. Look at that. I wonder if gender isn’t part of the chastising I get. Are my books supposed to be gentle and nurturing? Pat you on the head and say ‘There, there,’ if not with milksop content then with easy and predictable structure? In 2014? Surely not. I must be imagining it.

As for whether Canadian writers are expecting less from audiences and therefore offering less … I don’t read enough Canadian fiction to say. I don’t choose novels to read by the author’s homeland flag, but by something in the story itself, or the technique, that intrigues me.

Part of the title of this piece comes from Jonathan Ball’s review a little over a year ago of deluded your sailors in the Winnipeg Review. I wonder if your own writing touches on, deals with, or alludes to how other Canadian writers, past and present, deal with historical fiction?

I’m exposing my ignorance here. I simply have not read enough Canadian historical fiction, or enough literary theory on same, to go about commenting, either directly, or through how I structure my fiction, on what’s been done. I do often feel, here in Canada, that I am told ‘Don’t do this, don’t do that’’ more often than ‘Write it your way.’ (How are we going to categorize you, Michelle?) Much of the Canadian fiction I have read seems conservative, not only in approach—we seem to privilege realism—but in breadth of plot. I think my only reaction to the Canadian historical fiction I’m familiar with, my only comment on it, is ‘You do it your way. I’ll do it mine.’

I am not interested in rules here, in someone else’s definition of what good Canadian historical fiction might be. That mental tyranny is not too far removed from what my Department of Tourism, Culture, and Recreation with their Tourist Friendly Arts Template, or the Historical Accuracy Representation Committee, want to do in deludes your sailors:  control not just history by any expression of it, control story. One of the major themes in deluded your sailors is the need to understand, or at least face, one’s past. Asking big questions, poking dark corners, leaving established paths—my character Newman Head might call it cocksure ingenuity—entails big risk, causes wrecks. If I trouble the matter too much, and thereby make my work less ‘inviting’ (whatever that means), then I might lose some audience. Well, okay. I cannot, will not, write in a manner deemed easier by someone else simply for the sake of being less troubling. Being human is very troubling, yet beautiful: suffering shot through with grace. That is what I want to write about, and will write about, never mind someone else’s preferences or stale rules.

As mentioned, you’ve had short stories published in various anthologies, and that, in a way, brings us back to your first book, The shadow side of grace. Are you returning to that form and leaving the novel behind? Has your thinking about writing changed as you have received more recognition?

I am outlining two novels and slowly working on a pile of short stories. One novel will be on a more intimate scale than I’ve tried before, and the other will be broader. I’m burn-it dissatisfied with most of the short stories, which I take as a good sign. The stories, which I want to put out in a collection, are all over the map for subject and setting but have some deep thematic links. I did salvage one story, “Bush-hammer finish,” which The Fiddlehead published last fall, and which Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has picked up for their anthology Best American Mystery Stories 2014 coming out this fall. I didn’t know I’d written a mystery story; the editors’ definition of mystery includes fiction with criminal behaviour in it, which my story has got. ‘American’ covers the continent of North America. I do want to write more short stories. I enjoy reading them, finding them potent and strong, and very different from novels. But no, I am not leaving novels behind.

Has my thinking about my writing changed? It’s deepened, especially as I keep reading, and as I start to learn how fiction might work, but recognition or lack thereof has nothing to do with it.