Katie Zdybel is our guest today, and she is the writer of the short story collection Equipoise. She’s also a very good friend of mine, and we’ve just spent the last ten minutes talking about how what we do together is have really big conversations. Today, we wanted to talk with you about reframing our lives as writers through our characters — really digging into what we are offered through our writing, the partnership that is writing. How do you start? With theme? With character fragments? Then we’ll get to this reframing question, but I’m interested in that starting place.

Katie
With the short story collection, each of those ten stories, I started with a problem or a knot in life that was something I had been thinking about for a long time — something that had happened to me, or that I had been really close to and I couldn’t figure it out. I think that those particular issues in life that had been with me the longest are the ones that made it into the book, because I had done some preparatory work on them, just thinking about them and trying to understand them from different angles — but I still couldn’t after years, so I would start with that as a little kernel.

Rebecca
Can you give an example, Katie, of a kernel?

Katie
Let’s see… the very first story in the collection, Last Thunderstorm Swim of the Summer, I actually started that thinking about what it feels like to be in a place that’s very different from the place you’re used to being in at a very particular time of the year — so to be, in the height of summer, somewhere very different from where you normally experience that time of year which has really specific sounds and feelings and shades. That’s how I entered into the story, but as I started shaping that story, I realized that there was an even more difficult angle that I was interested in, which is: how do we form our sexual identity in relation to others, and purposefully not in relation to others? By looking at the women and girls around us, how do we as young girls start to figure out what it means to us to be a sexual being? And then how much of that can be done separate from any other influence at all?

Rebecca
Which is a big question that you didn’t set out to explore.

Katie
No, but it came in because this character that arrived, Ginny, that’s what she was dealing with, so she right away started going down this path where I was just following her. The other thing I do to get started is bring that issue into a place. I was really interested in writing about Sleeping Bear Dunes, which is a really cool part of Michigan. I don’t know if you guys have ever been there. It’s not how a lot of people imagine Michigan if they don’t know Michigan very well, but it’s my favourite part of Michigan, and so I wanted to write about Ginny going there, and having this big experience there, and then wanting to be there in summer, because once you’ve had that experience, you can’t imagine your summer unfolding without that in it — especially if you’ve been doing it yearly, which she has. But she suddenly finds herself in this other part of the state for summer, but then this other issue — it was really about her learning what it meant to her for a young woman to become a sexual being. So she took me away from what I had expected, but that was good. I was very glad to just go with her and try to understand what it was she needed to go through.

Rebecca
Can you write anywhere? Ocean Vuong, I just read that he says he can write anywhere. That’s his superpower. He’s done a lot of writing in Popeye’s, in the closet — he says just whatever makes sense for him at the time, the closet apparently was very quiet. The Popeye’s he liked because people weren’t in their writing as well. I wrote about it on my Observables, but just not that energy — there was no writing energy in Popeye’s. What do you think about that?

Katie
Yeah, I think I could write almost anywhere if I had a good pair of earplugs, if it was a noisy place. It would depend how desperate I was, too. I feel like my pattern around when and where I write changes all the time, just because of having small kids. Their patterns are changing all the time, and I have to just adapt to that. If that means that I just have to be prepared to write anywhere at any time, even for 20 minutes at a time, then I’ll be in a phase of that. I’m kind of in a phase of that right now, actually, because I’m working full time.

Rebecca
You just fit it in?

Katie
Yeah, I just fit it in. It’s not ideal — it’s way harder — but in the spring, summer and fall, I was using a Canada Council for the Arts grant, so I was writing full time, Monday through Friday, nine-to-five, and that was incredible. But that’s rare. That’s just a really rare gift. So I used that when I could, and now I’m in this other phase. When I wrote Equipoise, I wrote a lot while my babies were napping, to be honest — just, like, two hours in the afternoon.

Natalie
My husband has romanticized this memory he has of me when I was writing my dissertation, because my little kid was at the time just a baby. He was between the ages of one and two before I defended my doctoral project. Clifford has a memory of me doing this writing for four hours, pretty much every night. I think it was probably more like two, but that’s the number he’s used, so I’m going with him on it. But he remembers this as, like, I just sat down, and this is what I was going to do. He lauds me for it, which is really lovely. But my memory was just of what you described — it was just fitting it in. It was between feedings. You know what I mean? So my memory is not of something glorious or purposeful. It was not happenstance, but still, it’s kind of like… well, fitting it in. It’s like stuffing your wallet with as many little things as you can at that time. So it’s interesting to hear you describe a version of the same thing.

Katie
Yeah, I was really glad to have that because I think it felt to me… at a time when you’re most required to give the most of yourself to someone else. I’d never had that experience before having my first baby — the total surrender of your needs, on so many levels, to someone else. But when he slept, it was like, very finely tuned inward attention, which really fed me. I also felt suddenly more capable of fine tuned attention — just the spiritual part of having a baby, I think. It just hit me really deeply, and I was suddenly a lot more focused. I’m a pretty focused person, and I already had been, but it just ramped up big time. It’s a good memory. I just remember those moments of getting him to sleep and then going and sitting and writing and being in this deep meditative state — and then snapping out of it. When I would hear him wake up.

Rebecca
Can you harness that energy again? Can you remember it and be like, “Oh yeah, that’s what I want to have right now.”

Katie
Yes, that’s the state I’m in whenever I write. Right now, it’s a half hour in the evening, if I can manage it. Or if I’m spreading it out over the day from nine to five, like I did in the spring, summer, and fall. It’s close — that state is really close to me, in my mind. I do a lot of tasks around making sure that stays accessible to me.

Rebecca
Like meditation, is that what you mean?

Katie
Yeah, meditation, and then anything that I find starts to change the quality of my thinking — like quality in terms of attention span. I’ll just avoid it as much as I can. I don’t spend a lot of time on my phone. I don’t have notifications on my phone, except for texts, but I’m kind of discouraging of people texting me a lot. I try to read a lot, because I find that’s really good for building a long attention span. It’s the same kind of focus as writing, I think — when you immerse yourself in a fictional world through reading, I think you become more able to immerse yourself in a fictional world when you’re writing.

Natalie
Where’d you grow up, Katie?

Katie
In Kincardine. I really loved where I grew up, and I knew I loved it, even as a young child. I really just loved the lake so much. There’s a lot of farmland around there, as well as a small town. I grew up outside of Kincardine, just south of this small town. We were in a little neighbourhood, but there was a farm across the road, and the lake was down the street, and there was a forest that I spent a lot of time in. All of the variation in landscape around me, I loved it all, and I spent a lot of time in it. I still do. I’m back in Ontario now, and I just love the variety that’s offered in terms of land and weather and seasons. I just really like to spend time in it, and it certainly makes its way into my writing because I think about it all the time and I just have this urge to try to render it for some reason. I’m not sure if that’s like my love for it is fully felt or executed, if I can try to describe it. It’s an act of appreciation, maybe. I still don’t quite understand why, but I’ve lived in a bunch of different parts of Canada — East Coast, West Coast, in the Yukon, and here. For some reason (and it still makes me sad), I just couldn’t quite feel the love for the landscape in the Yukon that I have felt everywhere else that I’ve lived. I still want to know why, and I’m still writing a manuscript about it, trying to understand. It’s tricky, because so many people there love it so much that it’s hard to talk about without worrying about hurting someone’s feelings. I just would never want to disrespect the very valid appreciation there is for that landscape. I just also really want to examine why I couldn’t connect to it. I still don’t know, I just very much felt not at home there. Almost anywhere I’ve lived I felt at home, so it was just a strange sensation for me — and I was there for eight years, so I gave it a good try.

Rebecca
You tried to love it.

Natalie
You gave it a go. That’s the perfect segue for a question about reframing, because actually it sounds like maybe your way of trying to craft that manuscript is a long-term reframing process of what it means to reframe that place. How do you think of reframing when it comes to writing? Are you doing that in your stories purposefully, or do you feel like it’s inadvertently happening — the way that that character just emerged and came to you?

Katie
I think it can be both. In response to the Yukon thing (and then I want to come back and talk about it in a more general sense), but I was starting to write this manuscript about living in the Yukon, which I started writing because I was just having difficulty seeing the beauty of that landscape, which really puzzled me because I find nature so beautiful and moving, like I said, almost everywhere I’ve been — in travels and where I’ve lived. So I started to record really specific details about the texture of the air and the way the clouds look and the shift in the seasons. It was just observational, almost as though I was making daily sketches, and I submitted that to my workshop with Wayne Grady in the MFA program. Did you ever study with him, Rebecca?

Rebecca
Yeah, I did essay writing. I liked him a lot.

Katie
Yeah. I really liked him. He was really fantastic. So I started workshopping this with him (I think I took three semesters with him), and he said to me, “What you’re doing is writing yourself into this landscape, because you’re not naturally finding yourself there, but this manuscript is your opportunity to write your way in.” To me, that’s like ultimate reframing — and ultimate conscious framing, where you go in thinking, “I came here, and I don’t see myself here, and I can’t find myself here. But I’m going to use writing as a tool to weave my way in, in the best way I know how.” The only magic trick that I know how to do, I will use to try to make this connection. Then from there on, I could intentionally craft this manuscript so that I existed in this landscape as something that needed to be there, that made sense to be there. Outside of that manuscript, I really never came to that feeling, but in that manuscript, I’m still working with that. It did, in a way, change my relationship to the Yukon.

But in a general sense, when I first started listening to this podcast, the first thought I had was, “Oh my gosh, fiction writing is reframing. It’s totally reframing.” I’m not sure if everyone’s like this, but what we were saying before about starting with a kernel or an issue, something that you can’t quite understand and then writing about it, I think that is a kind of reframing, because you go in with something that you can’t make sense of. I really think reframing is trying to take something that’s maybe challenging or difficult and looking at it in a way that it becomes useful. You’re not going to reframe it so that it becomes more negative, right? You’re trying to reframe it so that you get something positive out of it — and that would be making something useful. I think that’s what fiction does — it takes a sticky problem, and then through characters inhabiting that problem, and acting and speaking and feeling, that problem suddenly becomes a little bit more malleable or not the fixed idea that you thought it was, but something that gets worked with and changes. Then by the time I’m finished writing a story, I have something useful. It’s not exactly a solution, or a happy ending, but it’s good. It’s a good feeling of, “Ok, I think I understand this a little bit better.”

I met with this book club, this one person was asking me, “Why would you write material that’s not going to end with a happy ending?” and I was like, “Well, I kind of feel like happiness is, to begin with, a weird word, but a successful outcome or a satisfying outcome is that you look at something that you would otherwise just consider to be negative, like a breakup or the dissolving of a friendship or some kind of impasse in your life. And instead, after careful consideration and mining, come out with something useful, or a comfort, or an ease with a hard feeling, an acceptance of a hard feeling — but not just like, “Oh, this is sad, and it’s just always going to be sad, but I can accept that,” but more, “Sadness as a part of life, and I have a better relationship with it and more full relationship with it.”

Rebecca
I like that — an acceptance of a hard feeling. So then you feel changed by your stories, too?

Katie
Yeah, the characters always surprise me and show me something. If I give a specific example, maybe Sonia in The Fly Swimmer, she’s an interesting character to me, because if you have a partnership with a person who has a fundamental difficulty with loving partnerships — has something in his past that makes it extremely hard for him to sustain a partnership — what is the wear and tear on that person’s partner? So how would she, Sonia, whose husband has a really difficult past, how would she sustain their partnership? If it relied on her to sustain it, how would she do that over time? Not that I think this is how it would be for everyone, but just thinking of something specific in my own experience, I wanted to play that out and see what this character would bring up. She had this real sadness to her that I felt like there wasn’t going to be an easy resolution, but there was going to be some kind of possible transformation. I guess that’s what happens with a lot of them, now that I say that — that I am not looking for an easy resolution, or if an easy resolution it offers itself I often don’t trust that but go past it or around it to see what else is offered aside from what I feel like we’re geared to look for, which is a happy ending or an easy resolution. Rather, what new truth is available there that doesn’t get rid of the hard feeling, but incorporates it?

Natalie
Because I’m thinking now, just in your description there, is there a character that after you’ve finished writing the story, you’ve actually returned to in terms of your own story? I have my students writing dialogues right now where they’ve got characters from a novel that they’ve read, and they now have to make a character of their choice interact with a character from either a poem or an essay that we’ve also read. So they’re having to have the two have a moment of dialogue and conversation. I’m fascinated to watch the students navigate this process. It’s very hard, and everybody’s really mad at me right now, but that’s ok because I feel like there’s something beautiful going to come out on the other side of those conversations. Something of that ilk. Have you ever had a conversation with one of your characters?

Katie
Well, I feel like when I’m writing a story about a character, they are communicating to me what I need to know for a very particular thread in their life. There’s a lot about them that I might not ever know. This is not prescriptive, but personally, I feel that it’s not my business to know anything that they don’t want to show me. I try to start a story where that issue has reached a point that it’s about to be transformed, and I follow them very closely, until the exact moment that they don’t need me to see it anymore. That moment is when it has taken a lift from where it’s been all along, and then I exit out. I try to do that very quickly and not have a lot of denouement in a story but rather just, “We got there, you did what you needed to do, and now my job is to close.” I do think about my characters a lot after I write them, and I reflect on them, but I don’t expect them to speak to me anymore. Except in one case, which is the title story of Equipoise — Equipoise, the short story. I finished that short story, and I had to come back to all of the four main characters, especially the protagonist. I’m actually working on two novels, and one of the novels I’m working on is a continuation of that short story.

Rebecca
So you felt they had more to say?

Katie
Yeah. The intersection of those two marriages and the two friendships — to me, there was just a lot to dig into there. I felt like the short story Equipoise looked at one angle, but there’s so many other angles. There’s the image in that story of Erin, the protagonist, looking at Alex, her husband’s best friend, and her best friend’s husband, and saying that he was like a man made of folded paper, and she had just unfolded another corner and seen him in a new shape. That’s what that whole short story was like for me — I just kept unfolding these little corners, and then suddenly it was a whole new shape. That just kept happening, so I wrote a whole manuscript about them.

Rebecca
Do you get anxiety when you’re working through an idea? Like, “I have to solve this,” that type of feeling? Sometmes I feel in my own life that I can walk around irritated, almost. “I need more time with this,” but it can make me not necessarily happy or fun to be around. Do you get that? The sense I have from you is that you have figured out a method to live with this profession in a way that you can still be a content person. Is that true, or are you about to shatter something for me?

Katie
No, I’m not going to shatter it. I think that is true. I don’t feel a lot of anxiety. I just feel when I’m working on something, the only tension there with real life is that I want more time — I just want more time to be in the story. But I have no expectations that I have some right to all this time. So it’s ok, it’s like a positive tension where I can just make use of the time that I do get very efficiently. I don’t feel an anxiety around, “Can I figure this out?” I just love that. I just love that feeling of writing something and then trying to figure out what it’s about. That’s the happiest use of my mind, I think.

Natalie
That’s like the ultimate reframing. The ultimate reframing of the potential limitations of time — simply see it as all gift. I just think that’s really great. That’s very Levinasian, I really like that. Do you feel like you are writing out of a place of real satisfaction or happiness? Because I wouldn’t say that the stories — it’s sort of like those ladies, that book club. You don’t dive into your short stories and go, “Well, this is like a super happy place,” — in a good way. I feel like reading your stories is a very generative experience. It’s a thoughtful, thought-provoking experience, and I appreciate that. But at the same time, you’re right — it’s not like you walk away and want to skip. More of a slightly ponderous, thoughtful walk that you’re going to take post-read, and yet it sounds to me like you have a real satisfied sense of your own process. Is there any angst in there? Like artistic angst that I’ve observed in many other artists in my life, including my own?

Rebecca
You could be the one artist that has a different way, Katie.

Natalie
Oh, I’d really love it. I’d think it was brilliant.

Rebecca
I’d totally love it, to shatter this tortured artist notion.

Natalie
Yeah, seriously. That’s a trope that maybe doesn’t need to ring so true to so many.

Katie
Yeah, I feel like that is something I resonate with — not having to write from a place of angst as an artist. I guess there’s two different things there. There’s an entry point into the story and content. I wouldn’t say I’m writing from angst or about angst, but I have experienced a lot of sadness and heartbreak and confusion and frustration, just like any human being who has ever had any relationship of any kind. You know, as well as being as a human being on the planet earth at this time, and all sorts of things that we try to understand as humans. I’m just having a really full human experience, and all of that is the material that I work with as an artist. I feel gratitude to be a person who lives artistically, however we want to interpret that, but for me it’s just someone who is, when I’m sitting down to write and when I’m thinking about my writing (which is a lot of the time), I can experience the world the way that feels right to me, which is really looking at it very, very closely and trying to feel it, and trying to understand, and trying to understand how people interact, and see the invisible world.

I think that would maybe be the best way of describing what I do: is trying to see the invisible world and then write it down. To me, it’s so satisfying. I just feel really alive, being able to do that. Having this book that’s actually published and being read, I’m learning about a whole new level of that, which is that other people want to read about the invisible world, and then talk to you about it. I’ve mostly dwelt there on my own, aside from a few special kindred spirits. Now it’s like, I have this really wonderful experience of people reading these stories and connecting with parts of it that they might not describe in that way as being in an invisible world, but to me, that’s what it is. That’s where we’re meeting, and it’s so awesome.

Rebecca
And you like meeting in your invisible world — am I getting how you think of it? Or you’re not saying that, you’re saying, “In the invisible world?”

Katie
Well, I guess it’s my meaning and my rendering of it, but hopefully we’re meeting there because people are there too, and have their own experience of it. I’m writing from experience and through my lens, so it’s certainly limited in that way, but I guess I feel that there is an invisible world that we can all inhabit, and that’s there all the time. How we come into it, I guess we have to do it uniquely, but hopefully that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to meet. I think we just all come there, in our own ways, but art is a really good way.

Rebecca
To find the invisible world? Or to meet?

Katie
Both, I think.

Rebecca
Yeah. That’s interesting. I’ve never had it said like that. I suspect you might not resonate with Ocean Vuong saying, “To be a writer is to traffic in failure.”

Katie
Well, there’s a lot of rejection, that’s for sure. I mean, you have to be…

Rebecca
What I understood him to mean in that context was that the book is not what you imagine. So the book you see in your head is not what ends up on the paper. In what I read, he was quite enjoying that process, of failure is actually…

Natalie
Freeing?

Rebecca
Freeing and exciting. But how do you feel about — is the book on the page what you imagined? It sounds like maybe you don’t come with so many preconceptions, so maybe you don’t suffer that particular plight.

Katie
Yeah, I don’t think I have preconceptions about how it will be interpreted. I have hopes for how it will be received. You know, I want people to really enjoy it and deeply engage. That’s probably my hope. But I don’t really expect people to interpret it in a certain way. The whole point for me of writing is to just really deeply engage with life, and so if it’s not doing that, then I’m not finished with it.

But narrative is so interesting, because narrative has this real pull. Coming back to your question about, “What do you start with?” but also the question of, “Do you write from a place of some kind of angst or dissatisfaction?” I think you have to start from a place of something being out of balance, or something being disconnected. I think I would connect more with those words then saying ‘angst’ or even ‘dissatisfaction.’ Something is not in place, or something has disconnected. So you have to start with that because narrative requires that you go through a change, and that it has this build of tension — that doesn’t necessarily have to take the plot graph / inverted checkmark shape, I don’t think, but it does have to build tension around whether that will turn out well or badly, and then it has to go through transformation. I think the kind of endings that interest me are transformations that you didn’t expect, and that don’t result in, “It turned out well,” or, “It turned out badly,” but rather, “It turned out differently, and this differently opens us up to an idea that we didn’t even know was a possibility,” which is probably something quite small — you know, just a way to feel about something. I just think of that in terms of what you’re writing, and where it takes you, and where you let it take you. There’s also the question of, “Are you writing a narrative in there?” Because if you are, there is a route that narrative will follow. There is a pathway that narrative will follow. Narrative is fueled by a conflict finding its resolution.

Rebecca
Interesting. If we could all live with that sense of ‘a small knot has been loosened, and that’s enough,’ in life. We would all live much more satisfied lives if we lived with your approach to writing, and to narrative. This is a good conversation that could go on for hours, and in fact, Nat, that’s why our conversations go on for hours. You can see why, because there’s so much to think about and to learn from each other. But I want to do just a quick speed round for you, ok Katie?

Katie
Ok, yep.

Natalie
So you can’t think too hard.

Rebecca
And unfortunately, they’re still big questions, because I couldn’t think of small questions. Ok, Nat, we’ll alternate, and I’ll just say it really fast.

Natalie
Yeah.

Rebecca
What’s the last new skill you learned?

Katie
Would learning about posture count? I’m learning about proper posture, so I’m doing all these exercises around posture.

Rebecca
Yes.

Natalie
What’s a common myth that people maybe misunderstand about what you do for a living — your profession?

Katie
Maybe the idea that there’s a real ‘angsty artist’ character, or that we’re all that way. I think we’re not all that way. I’m sure there’s lots of angsty artists, and they have every right to be, but we’re not all.

Rebecca
Ok. I realize this is such a big question, so it’s not good for a speed round, but now you just see how I am. What has been the biggest challenge that you’ve overcome?

Natalie
Rebecca!

Rebecca
Ok, Nat, can you reframe that into something more fun? What was the hardest thing you did today? Actually no, what was the funnest thing you did today?

Natalie
I like that question. Ready… go!

Katie
The funnest thing I did today? I wrote — I worked on my novel. I decided to play hooky from work.

Natalie
Beautiful. How would your siblings describe you? Like three key words they would use to describe you.

Rebecca
Or just one.

Katie
Goofy, responsible, and… optimistic.

Rebecca
Ok, what’s one thing you need to be creative? A drink, or a… like coffee or tea. One thing, or maybe it’s not a thing, it’s a…

Katie
Just time. Just time.

Rebecca
Ok, time.

Natalie
And what did you have for dinner tonight?

Katie
Sushi that my husband made.

Natalie
Yes. My husband does that in my house, too. I love that.

Rebecca
You had sushi as well, Nat?

Natalie
No, I’m just saying it’s my husband that will make it, which is really nice.

Katie
Isn’t that great?

Rebecca
We all get together.

Katie
Yes, I think we do.

Natalie
Katie, thank you for this real gift of time.

Katie
Yeah, thank you guys. Sorry, I intended to reciprocate more questions, but they were really good questions and I really enjoyed thinking about them.

Rebecca
Oh yeah — no, this is all about you.

Natalie
It’s a real thoughtful time, for sure.

Rebecca
Yeah. Thanks for bringing yourself — all yourself. Do you ever not bring your whole self?

Katie
With you, I’m always all there.

Rebecca
You’re always there, ok.

Katie
Yeah. I think like in a grocery store or talking to a neighbour, I might not be. I’m not sure, but I think we should hang out more often. It’s great.

Rebecca
You can go and analyze if you’d bring your whole self to every neighbour.

Katie
Is that a rapid fire question? I don’t know. Maybe.

Rebecca
Ok. Thank you so much, Katie, and I love you.

Katie
I love you too.

Rebecca
I love you too, Nat.

Natalie
Love you too.

Katie
So nice to meet you, Nat.

Natalie
This was wonderful. Thanks so much, Katie.

Katie
Take care, you guys.

Rebecca
Bye.

Natalie
Bye.

Rebecca
Oh yes, some house business. Don’t forget to rate, review, and subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts. This is actually really important. Consider a donation on Patreon if these reframing conversations have supported you or someone you know. And please sign up for our Sister On! newsletter which we send out every Friday. It comes with an original recipe from Nat which, I tell you, her recipes are really good. All the links are in our show notes. Love, Sister On!