November 19, 2021

Angels, Hope, and High Stakes: A Conversation with Shawna Lemay

Shawna Lemay’s new book is the novel Everything Affects Everyone. You should be reading her blog Transactions With Beauty.

First thing: I am not interested in angels. Not at all, and so I’d wondered about Shawna Lemay’s new novel, whether it would have the power to sustain my non-interest in angels for the length of a book, but if you’ve ever read anything by Shawna Lemay (her blog, her fiction, her poetry, her essays) you’ll know that her work is never just about one thing anyway, instead a jumping off point for daydreams and reveries and musings on art and other golden things

Second thing: Everything Affects Everyone is a novel about questions, and boy do I have some, such as “How did your obsession with Bruce Springsteen influence this novel?” and “How you decide what kind of container your ideas will fit into, especially since there is such wide overlap and connections between everything you write?” and “What does it mean when you’re writing about questions and answers and dialogue, and yet YOU (Shawna Lemay) are imagining all of it, the illusion of a back and forth,” which kind of makes me start thinking of angels then, and reminds me of one of my favourite lines from the book about how maybe angels aren’t real, but the doubt is real, the wondering is real.

Everything Affects Everyone is wonderful and strange, rich and engaging, provocative and comforting, and filled with mystery and beauty. And what impressed me most about this book is how Lemay’s entire oeuvre is an essential context for appreciating this book properly, the way it fits into and extends her ideas and philosophy, which is utterly original, and inviting, which you can’t say about most things one might term a “philosophy.”

I am obsessed with Shawna Lemay’s obsessions, and the generosity with which she shares them, and the way that she can make me become vicariously obsessed with anything.

Even angels.

*****

Kerry: Can I start off with: How did your obsession with Bruce Springsteen influence this novel?

Shawna: I don’t think there could be a more perfect first question. I wanted to write a book where the stakes were high which I used to understand as maybe telling a story about the brutal state of the world, a story that was about escaping trauma or violence or incredibly difficult circumstances. I admire these kinds of high stakes narratives. I find them necessary. But there are other approaches.

It felt almost radical to insist on a narrative that looks at beauty and mystery and tries to move toward hope. Springsteen puts everything into his songs, and then also creates a narrative about his life, and lets that live around his work, too. Everything he does is part of the Springsteen story, I think. So, I like that. The stakes are high for Springsteen—he doesn’t shy away from the tough subjects, but he comes to them through music that is pure joy. 

Springsteen says, “…you can change someone’s life in three minutes with the right song. I still believe that to this day. You can bend the course of their development, what they think is important, of how vital and alive they feel.” There are the things that you hope to do when you write a novel, but it will be received however it will be received. I would love to think that this book could go some way toward making the reader feel alive, feel invigorated.

It felt almost radical to insist on a narrative that looks at beauty and mystery and tries to move toward hope.

And then in an Esquire interview he says, “You’re trying to take all this misunderstanding and loathing, and you’re trying to turn it into love—which is the wonderful thing that happens when you’re trying to make music out of the rough, hard, bad things. You’re trying to turn it into love.” So while it may or may not come through in the novel, I asked myself, what if you just pour everything you have into this container called a novel, and just let it all turn into love somehow? What would that look like? Instead of the cockroach in Kafka’s The Metamorphoses, what if we had an angel? What if the act of imagining ourselves as an angel was just another way of imagining how to be human? What if we could be the angel who could guard each others’ “dreams and visions?”

Kerry: Oh wow, I love this, I asked the question because I honestly had no idea what your answer would be (and these are usually the most worthwhile questions to be asking in the first place), if it might be that there’s no connection at all, because it wasn’t like I read Everything Affects Everyone, and was thinking about Bruce Springsteen. But I know that your connection to him had been somewhat concurrent with your writing of the book, and (as somebody wise once titled her novel) everything affects everyone.

And I’m so glad you mentioned containers, because this WAS on my mind as I read your book. You who I first met through a blog called “The Capacious Hold-All.”

First of all, I feel like your containers are ever overflowing, anybody who’s read your blog, and your essays, your fiction and even your photography will know how connected they are, that these are all just different containers for your ideas and fascinations. Would you agree with this assessment? And how did you know/decide that Everything Affects Everyone was going to be a novel? I could see how it might have been poetry or nonfiction as well—and it even takes the form of invented nonfiction. So why fiction? How did you choose this particular container?

Shawna: I love your description of my work as being different containers for my fascinations—I immediately envision a still life of all sorts of clear glass jam jars, different shapes, with different facets, designs, sizes, filled with colourful liquid like potions—the light striking them and casting colourful shadows. And you’re right, I could have written a book of poetry or essays about angels. But I think a novel is the proper container for my angel fascinations because of the way that it holds mystery. All writing has this potential, of course. It had to do with time and movement, in the way that a viewer in a museum will look at a still life and experience it close-up and without moving very much, vs looking at a huge landscape or scene—the way you walk from one side of it to the other side, you move back, move forward. The text of a poem embeds in you differently than the text of a novel that you spend maybe days reading. Angels are like a flash of poetry but then there is all that living around an angel experience. 

I think a novel is the proper container for my angel fascinations because of the way that it holds mystery.

Well, I say all this, but in honesty, the form just happened. It called. The writing proceeded organically and with surprisingly little calculation. I had Clarice Lispector’s words in my head about genre. She says, “Genre no longer interests me. What interests me is mystery.” But I had that in my head when I wrote The Flower Can Always Be Changing, too. (It’s the epigraph of that book). This book is in part an effort to be in conversation with Clarice Lispector, who for me, as soon as I learned of and read her work (which I can only read in translation) made my hair stand on end. I think Rumi and the Red Handbag is in conversation (bold claim) with The Hour of the Star and maybe this book is in conversation with The Passion According to G.H. Or maybe A Breath of Life. This sounds grandiose but I really didn’t want to die without having written this novel and published this book. I wanted to fill that container with my all. 

Kerry: How did angels start to happen for you?

Shawna: I have intermittently been called an angel my whole life. I know that this is because as a child I had white blonde hair. If you had asked me as a kid what an angel was I probably would have answered “a goodness.” And I knew I wasn’t necessarily that, so immediately: a contradiction, a “huh!” As far as I knew back then, all the adults were calling all the children angels. One of the more memorable times I was called an angel was by the Irish poet Michael McCarthy who died in 2018. He recounts our meeting in his posthumous book, Like a Tree Cut Back. The year was 1995. Michael writes: “On my second day in Edmonton I visited a bookshop in the local mall. A young, tall woman approached me and asked if she could help.” He had this otherworldly quality, and I would find out until later that he was a priest, and that he was recovering from cancer. He would win the Patrick Kavanagh Award for the book of poems he wrote in his time in Edmonton. I would introduce him to the poetry community and because of that he often referred to me as his angel. But when I met him, he seemed the angel, or at the very least a magical bird. It was the middle of winter. He took off his toque in front of the poetry self, and his grey hair stood on end with the static. The air around him crackled. 

Another one of the angels of my life is Barb Langhorst. I can’t remember the year but she was teaching at St. Peter’s College in Saskatchewan, and was using the story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez titled, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.” She sent me a copy because she knew it would interest me. I became obsessed with the story which can easily be found on the internet these days, but also in his Collected Stories. As soon as I read it I knew it would find its way into my writing someday. But it turned out that Amanda Leduc wrote The Miracles of Ordinary Men first, an amazing book. And then in 2017, Peter Darbyshire wrote his edgy and super cool Has the World Ended Yet?—which is full of angels. But by then I realized (and was already writing this book) that you could sit a dozen people in a room and say, write about angels, and they’d all write something completely different. So that was a good moment. 

I realized that you could sit a dozen people in a room and say, write about angels, and they’d all write something completely different. So that was a good moment. 

Meanwhile, people who come into the library where I work continue to call me an angel from time to time. (Maybe now that I’ve said that it won’t happen again). A couple of weeks ago, though, on a phone call (so it wasn’t about the blonde hair) I looked something up for a person who then said repeatedly, you are an angel, a real angel. My book was in the stores at that point and it honestly really shocked me. I do, funnily, get that fairly often at the library, but then I’m pretty sure all library workers get that. 

In short, though, I would say that on average throughout my life I’ve been called an angel by someone once every couple of months. When I say it though, man, that sounds weird! But there it is. It always startles me. It’s a shock. Electricity! Whenever someone calls me an angel I always assume they’ve got it backwards, and they’re the angel. 

Kerry: What’s the connection with libraries and angels? (I love, by the way, that your novel references City of Angels, and that it’s not just fancy German art films all the time. The lack of pretension with which you talk about rarefied things is so inspiring, plastic bags and grocery store flowers…)  

Shawna: I think most writers and readers have had what is known as a “library angel” experience in “coincidence theory.”  (Which in fact, I had done no looking into until just now). There’s a book by Arthur Koestler that details the phenomena anecdotally, apparently. (Perhaps that book will fall into my path now that I’ve mentioned it). It’s just the phenomena, though, of a book finding you in whatever way as if you have conjured it, and there are tales of books falling off the shelf and it being the precise one that person needed or was hoping for. Have you ever had an experience like that?

I’ve had a few of those library-angel experiences, though I tend to just put them down to serendipity, or the fact that because I spend so much time working in a library that this is just bound to happen. But people regularly talk about this sort of thing happening in library-world. 

And if we can think of angels less as figures from the history of religion, and more as either paranormal or secular manifestations or projections of our unknowing or as non-denominational spiritual messengers (so many possibilities!), then it makes some sort of sense that they end up in a library. In the secular world of my novel, the angels wouldn’t be drawn so much to cathedrals but to libraries because this is where people seek—libraries are full of people seeking information, help of so many different types. If angels are primarily messengers of one sort or another, then a library is a pretty great place to impart them. 

In the secular world of my novel, the angels wouldn’t be drawn so much to cathedrals but to libraries because this is where people seek. If angels are primarily messengers of one sort or another, then a library is a pretty great place to impart them. 

There’s a lot of literary and filmic precedence for angels in libraries, too, so I liked echoing that. As you mention, scenes occur in City of Angels and Wings of Desire. But there are library scenes in Lucifer, and in Constantine, where Tilda Swinton plays the angel Gabriel. There is also the amazing Charles Simic poem which he wonderfully allowed me to use in the book. 

There is the fabulous quotation by Caitlin Moran about libraries, where she says a library “is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination.” And in my experience, a lot of people come to libraries not so much to be healed, though that also happens a lot, but to find hope. Just being in a library is a kind of message, so there’s that too. It makes sense that angels would congregate in such a place. 

Kerry: Sometimes you ask a question and the answer you get is more wondrous than you’d ever supposed it could be. I love this, Shawna! And I suppose I have experienced “library angels.” I used to work in a library when I was in university, and there are so many books that came into my life because they happened to be on my shelving cart, or because they happened to be filed beside a title that was. I suppose that’s less random, really, but it was such an inspiring method of discovery.

I also remember doing “shelf reading,” which was going into the stacks to read the spine of every single book to ensure that the books were in order, which I once upon a time supposed was a kind of make-work project, but now I see we were being library angels ourselves, rescuing volumes that might have become fallen or misfiled, and needed to restored.

And now I am thinking of angels as agents of order? Or disorder?

Shawna: I love that you worked in a library when you were in university! I did, too, and I don’t think I knew that about you. I worked in the science library for five years which was such an interesting place for an English major. Anyone who frequents libraries though has experienced the angel of shelf reading! They just might not know that. 

One thing I love about working in libraries, and I guess I’ve been in one library or another as a worker for more than twenty years of my working life, is watching the body language of people in libraries. I’ve internalized a lot of it, but I think I could write a whole book on just that, which would of course include photographs! There’s an utterly unique way of “being” in a library, is my theory. 

Kerry: I am thinking too about your own preoccupation with questions, with dialogue—so much of your book is written as questions and answers, you exploring the power of this sort of exchange. And what is different, or perhaps even just the same, because you, the fiction writer, happen to be questioner and answerer both here?

Your novel also made me think about the title of Miriam Toews’ novel Women Talking, which would also have made a good title for Everything Affects Everyone.

Is asking you if a fictional conversation is as potent as an actual conversation sort of like critiquing a still-life because you can’t eat it?

Fittingly, or not, I don’t even have a question here, Shawna. Except maybe, “what say you?”

Shawna: Well, to immediately circle back to libraries, I think I’ve just realized, because of this conversation that we’re having right now, that so much of the book is informed by my experience of what we like to call in the biz, “the reference interview.” Wow. And so what every library worker knows and works toward, and really this is one of my life’s main raison d’êtres, is the perfection of the reference interview. Which is ever unattainable, a work in progress, the holy grail of library work. Because, as in most conversations, a lot of what happens is sidelong. Sure there is often the straightforward person who comes in wanting X book, asks for X book, and walks out with same. Wonderful, that! But often the person arrives looking for something that they can’t say, or don’t know how to say, or want to say but are too uncomfortable to say, or don’t even know that they can ask for this thing that they need. So, it is this really delicate back and forth, that must be purely openhearted, and orchestrated to not presume, to not overextend, to probe but with good intent, with a mind to privacy, a mind to empathy, and with a great deal of instinct, as to when to be blunt, or ask the really dumb or super open ended questions, when to be silent, when to nod. It’s an exercise in hope and humility and curiosity and must be filled with a genuine interest in the human before you. 

So, it is this really delicate back and forth, that must be purely openhearted, and orchestrated to not presume, to not overextend, to probe but with good intent, with a mind to privacy, a mind to empathy, and with a great deal of instinct, as to when to be blunt, or ask the really dumb or super open ended questions, when to be silent, when to nod.

So I guess all of this to say, that I’m always thinking about how we can have a better conversation, in the aforementioned circumstance, but also in other areas of our lives. There was a recent interview on On Being, with the always wonderful Krista Tippett in conversation with Priya Parker, about gathering. They talk about how a gathering is improved by the preparation beforehand, when we guide the invitees on how to show up. Like, let the people know what they’re showing up for, what’s the purpose! What’s the framework? There’s an intentionality. They quote another favourite author of mine, John O’Donohue, that an intentionally extended invitation allows us “to cross our thresholds worthily.” And a conversation can be a threshold, too. How do we have better conversations? How can conversations be transformational? How do we transform in conversations? 

I was reading recently (ack I can’t remember where) about the difference between an answer and a response, and how an answer will potentially close things down, but a response will keep things open. And isn’t that interesting to ponder? 

Regarding the fictional conversation. This is interesting, because I think I was drawn to that form partly because in real life, I’m not the best interview subject, haha! I’m not. If we were sitting here talking I would not be getting half this stuff out, because I usually get so nervous, my brain shuts down. So maybe writing fictional conversations is a way to redeem this failing? Maybe. But it also allows the writer to be in two minds about something, to embrace more than one possibility, and to even posit things that they don’t necessarily believe, but want to hear “out loud” as a sounding board of sorts. 

Kerry: Oh, yes! I often think of something you wrote awhile back: “Consider the opposite.” That idea is a kind of touchstone for me. How would you say that Everything Affects Everyone is a demonstration of this very idea?

Shawna: When I was writing Rumi and the Red Handbag, part of what got me started was thinking about what a literary critic had said, about how men go on quests, but women go on errands. And then I got thinking about errands as quests, the handbag as the grail, which led to the central question of that book which is, What are you going through? When we start to wonder about the opposite of one thing, quest vs errand, for example, we then begin to question if those two things are really in opposition and how. 

So with Everything Affects Everyone, I was very much inspired by the Marquez story, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” and wondered if it could be young women with you know, just beautiful wings. But then what kept coming back to me was Kafka’s Gregor Samsa and his transformation into probably a cockroach. And wondering what happens when instead of a cockroach, one becomes an angel. And what if wondering about what it would be like to become an angel were really just another way of imagining what it’s like to become a human, or a better human, or just to become who we are. And isn’t that a marvellous possibility?

So I love that you have held that phrase, “consider the opposite,” because while it’s not explicitly in the book, it has meant a lot to me, too! 

And what if wondering about what it would be like to become an angel were really just another way of imagining what it’s like to become a human, or a better human, or just to become who we are. And isn’t that a marvellous possibility?

Shawna Lemay