On the woman’s first day at work the poet helped her with her boxes, but as he was helping he was looking away.
“Do you know this is my seventieth sick day since I started here?” he asked.
“But you’re here,” she said.
“Yes, I know.” And he went to the bathroom and peed blood.
—from, The Poet and the Philosopher as Roommates
We here at Mutable first heard of Sheila Heti some six or seven years ago, when she went on tour with the event she founded, Trampoline Hall, while promoting her first book, The Middle Stories, put out by McSweeney’s. We were taken by her stories, and she has continued to tickle and tug at our interest both in her own writing and in the projects she involves herself in.
Her prose is well-hewn stuff, elegant and terse. For example, “There are many machines in the world, so now we know something about machines.” The stories themselves, however, have an emotional potency that plays well against the simple lines used to draw its contours. They also often have a fairytale element, although the story that introduced us to her work, The Poet and the Novelist as Roommates, is more clinical and elusive. It opens with the line, “The poet went softly to the novelist’s bedroom, while the novelist lay asleep, sleep coming out heavy like a stink through his nose.”
Part of the delight revolves around conceptual paradoxes such as this, sleep as an odor, or positing a statement that presents us with a sense of our own ignorance while supposedly presenting us with knowledge of a particular thing. But it is done with a stylistic fluidity and emotional integrity that transcends any sleight of hand trick. Her stories often seem to be an attempt to resolve some particular problem, a problem that has yet to be put into words, and can only be explored in this particular case, because its power is in the individual moment, not some generic absolute. There is a smirk behind much of what she does, but also a sincerity, that behind the wry humor is something very very serious.
Besides Trampoline Hall, Heti has also been involved in a number of other projects, most recently being a compilation of dreams during the last presidential election involving each of the candidates. The dreams were organized into dreams about Barack, dreams about Hillary, dreams about McCain, dreams that include more than one candidate, and dream analysis. They are a delight to pursue.
Such as for example this one: “I got on an elevator in a skyscraper. A man in a suit stepped onto the elevator with me. I pushed the button for the tenth floor. I turned and saw that the man in the suit was using a breast pump. I could not see the part that attached to him, just the tubing and the bottles that collect the milk. In the ten seconds that it took us to reach the tenth floor, he filled both 5 oz bottles. WOW! I thought admiringly. He is really productive! The man was Barack Obama.”
Her second book, Ticknor, is a brief fictionalized portrait of George Ticknor, biographer of William H. Prescott. It is tightly wound, constantly hinting at the resentment that has fueled this one-sided friendship, but what struck us here at Mutable was again the sense of something carved as opposed to sloughed off, a refined and distinct thing. So much of what is produced these days seems as if it was painted in broad strokes, while Sheila Heti is all fine inkwork.
These first literary works of Ms. Heti are perhaps too strange and small to have made the sort of splash we here at Mutable would have liked, but she exists as much as an aesthetic than as an artist of any particular type. She is a lecturer, a writer of shorter and longer (although not too terribly long) prose, an essayist, but most importantly, her critical vision, with its many alluring twists and turns, is everywhere apparant.
She has also toured with The Hidden Cameras, and does interviews with persons such as Mary Midgley and Dave Hickey for The Believer. She lives and works in Toronto, but if you’re really interested, you can learn more about Ms. Heti here.
Gabriel Boyer has been making up stories about himself for as long as he can remember. There was never a time he was not fully seated in his various delusions. He continues to delude himself daily. His latest release is below. You can read more about him here.
