Different Imaginings: A Conversation with Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer
August 23, 2023
“There is no structure that doesn’t depend on imaginative leaps. There’s hope there. But we have to watch out, because nefarious regimes are also aware that the gaps in reason are opportunities for different imaginings. – Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer
Christine Fischer Guy talks to Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer about her new novel, Wait Softly Brother.
Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer is the bestselling author of the novels All the Broken Things, Perfecting and The Nettle Spinner. She is also the author of the story collection, Way Up. Her work has appeared in Granta, The Walrus, Maclean’s, The Lifted Brow, Significant Objects, Storyville and others. Kathryn teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Toronto. Photo credit: Tracey A. Clarke
Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer. Wait Softly Brother. Wolsak & Wynn, $24.00, 242 pp., ISBN: 978-1-989496-66-4
Wait Softly Brother (Buckrider Books) is a trick of light, a book that is once a story and the creative act of story-making itself. “It is true that if you start to scratch at the threads of any narrative,” Kathryn writes, “you discover it is just another enchantment.”
The novel opens with the central character, also called Kathryn, leaving her marriage and alighting at her childhood home to chase the story of a brother who died in childbirth. As she helps her parents triage a basement of accumulated stuff, the story of a distant relative overtakes the one she’s writing. While she’s picking up the trail of the substitute soldier, the floods of personal and climate catastrophe rise and Kathryn must confront warring narratives both within herself and in society at large.
Wait Softly Brother is the novel Kathryn has been tacking towards through her stories and previous novels, a blurring of the boundaries between myth, personal history and imaginative leaps into the unknown. The result is a hypnotic, engrossing novel that unfolds in dream time.
Christine Fischer Guy: I’m always interested in genesis. You write in your acknowledgements that this book “took many paths before it felt like it had become itself.” Where’s the trailhead for Wait Softly Brother?
Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer: I began writing the Civil War sections on a beta-website called Red Lemonade (it no longer exists). I was experimenting with writing “automatically.” I was interested in the unconscious mechanism of writing in a parallel way to how the surrealists were, but also fascinated by the vulnerability of writing directly on a website that was a social networking apparatus. Other writers and fans could comment (and did) on the early sections of this book. I found that really invigorating. I would like to write a novel entirely publicly one day.
I always knew there would be a frame story around the Civil War material because I am not really interested in historical accuracy or historical fiction. I know that might piss people off but reading and writing is idiosyncratic and that is just the truth of it. That said, I didn’t land on the current frame story until I had done a lot of introspection (and therapy!), left my marriage, and moved away from the city. It took me a long time to see how the frame and the Civil War sections needed to interact. I think this was likely because I was processing a lot of new information: leaving a long relationship, entering into a new one, leaving the city, my family. I was also, uncoincidentally, working on a PhD thesis during much of the writing of the book and was, therefore, invested in psychoanalytic theory, the eighteenth-century novel as it formed, and how creativity operates.
CFG: Ursula K. Le Guin talks about putting history in its rightful place in a conversation with marine conservationist Jonathan White (Talking on the Water: Conversations about Nature and Creativity). I’d love your thoughts on this excerpt:
“History is one way of telling stories, just like myth, fiction, or oral storytelling. But over the last hundred years, history has pre-empted the other forms of storytelling because of its claim to absolute, objective truth. Trying to be scientists, historians stood outside of history and told the story of how it was. All that has changed radically over the last twenty years. Historians now laugh at the pretense of objective truth. They agree that every age has its own history, and if there is any objective truth, we can’t reach it with words. History is not a science, it’s an art.”
KK: Science, lest we forget, is also an art. Humans have subjected themselves to language and language forces us into a position of narration. All of human subjectivity is, well, subjective. So, I don’t see much distinction among the categories of our existence. The game of it seems to be to what extent any discipline — science, medicine, history, religion, academia, literature, politics — can accrue believers to its idiosyncratic “story.” This is called power even if those people who happen to believe will call it truth. I love story, but I try to keep it in its place.
Its beauty, to me, has to do with its instability, its unreliability, its messiness. That expression, “Nature abhors a vacuum”? It’s the same with the human mind. We don’t like uncertainty, or any gaps in logic, so we fill them in. And then we surmise it’s truth unless we are literary writers and then we surmise it’s fiction. To the extent that Wait Softly Brother is “historical,” it is also a testament to the way in which history can cover over messiness. My aim in the novel was always to declaim a baroque space for creativity. Where my protagonist, Kathryn, is subjected to a void or gap in knowledge, she sees creative opportunity. But maybe that is always what history is.
CFG: And what a creative opportunity it is. While triaging items at her parents’ place and reflecting on the story she’s writing, Kathryn muses, “If we had found a different, better text to believe in way back then – not the Bible but, say, Gilgamesh, or even a weird poem like “Wulf and Eadwacer” – might things have turned out differently?” As you say, many of us can’t tolerate even the smallest amount of uncertainty—witness the wide range of conspiracy theories that arose during the pandemic.
Belief is a good framing for this very human problem, I think. Is that why the fantastic has a constant presence in your work? Is it a helpful tool to bridge that belief chasm?
KK: We’ve been trained for hundreds of years to seek the rational, but before the Enlightenment in England, the English-speaking world read and told romances: stories filled with wild, impossible imaginings — trees and animals that spoke and magical entities that brought good or bad luck or who, in the case of selkies, suffered for their seductive otherness. These old stories are coded with important truths that we have mostly discarded when we renounced any affiliation with unreason. And now, we are discovering that animals do talk in their way and that trees speak, too. We are discovering what we previously knew.
My work is only a small attempt to recall that the space of creativity is a space of nonsense, of ellipses, of uncertainty, of magic, of unreason. We can be sure of this in the way that societies tend to sideline and impoverish artists. We can also be sure of art’s pre-eminence in the way it is vilified under totalitarian regimes.
In my fiction, I can test out things. I can say, what if there is an untold, or better yet, an untellable narrative. And then go ahead and tell it as if it were the most normal thing to recount. Words make things happen. Even the early realist novels fail to foreclose on the fabulous.
CFG: Art is intimidating to regimes, which serves as validation of its actual power. Among the first actions of invading Soviets in 1968 Prague (a backdrop for my new novel) was a shutdown of radio stations. How dangerous was uncensored music and associated discourse, how threatening!
Shortly after Kathryn arrives at her childhood home, constant rain builds to a Biblical flood. As the emotional and actual water rises, Kathryn learns not to stem the tide but to float above it, with it. How does this impact Kathryn the writer and Kathryn the character?
KK: Kathryn in Wait Softly Brother meets the rising waters (the climate catastrophe of the novel) as such because, as a writer, she is willing to enter that incoherent space of the creative act. She is searching for the truth about her stillborn brother but instead all she finds is the imaginative act of making it up. The world conspires to make her surroundings womb-like—oceanic.
Whatever is repressed finds its way into the story she is writing — she can’t stem that tide either. And so up burbles Boyt, this unstable soldier fabricated from the archival material her mother hands her. He is unable to fit in society and is troubled by whatever story he finds himself in. He misreads everything, he is unable to be a man in a world he can’t read. He is a figment of Kathryn’s imagination as she grapples with her own inability to fit in. Just as she can’t abide the role of mother and wife set out for her (and into which she unwittingly inscribed herself), neither can Boyt, her alter-ego, abide what it is to be a man. Kathryn (the author, me) is trying to write a novel in which the enterprise of modern society is laid bare as a failed one for both men and women. And she (me) is also providing the gap or notion to reinvent a better one.
There is no structure that doesn’t depend on imaginative leaps. There’s hope there. But we have to watch out, because nefarious regimes are also aware that the gaps in reason are opportunities for different imaginings.
CFG: Those gaps in reason can also be thought of as periods of exile, which the novel is also thematically busy with: estrangement from the familiar opens space for different imaginings. Le Guin again, a hero of mine, from her Stanford address World-Making: “To find a world, maybe you have to have lost one. Maybe you have to be lost. The dance of renewal, the dance that made the world, was always danced here at the edge of things, on the brink, on the foggy coast.”
Distant relative Boyt is self-exiled from his family as a substitute soldier and then from his company after becoming wounded. Kathryn is self-exiled from her married life and feels twice exiled in the company of her parents, who block her attempts to know the truth about her brother. Do their states of exile nudge them toward their dances of renewal, their attempts to re-make their worlds?
KK: In both cases, the world that the character was in service to — Boyt’s is 19th century upper middle-class mores, a father who is unpredictable and demanding and a compliant mother, the expectation being that he toe the line and Kathryn’s is really not all that dissimilar. She is living in 21st century Toronto, managing a chaotic family while her husband works. The load is heavy and not remunerated. For her as for Boyt, the burden of narrative expectation becomes unbearable. They both exit wholesale.
I don’t think it is imperative to leave a situation to change it. But sometimes the circumstances of a marriage or of family make it really difficult to make even small changes. Your friends and family typically prefer an idea of you that they have built (their story), and resisting that story can cause conflict. In the case of Kathryn, much of the strife with her parents stems from the fact that they want to maintain the illusion of their story's veracity over hers.
CFG: While staying with her parents, Kathryn encounters what she believes to be evidence of a selkie ancestor, a creature of mythic significance that occurs in multiple cultures. Selkies can be male or female but are defined by their longing for release from their parental burden, which can only be achieved by abandoning the family unit. You’ve worked with selkie mythology before (your brilliant story “Seal”). It’s powerful medicine. Is freedom incompatible with parenthood, or do selkies among us find a different way?
KK: Selkies are beings that can appear human when they strip themselves of their seal skin. Often in Celtic lore the stories revolve around women whose skins have been stolen by fishermen who fall in love with their human form. Without their skin, selkies cannot leave land and so they are held prisoner. They often marry and bear children with their human kidnappers, further binding them to the land. In “Seal” I use the mythology to highlight postpartum depression, the otherness of suddenly finding one’s freedom curtailed. The longing for water is a longing for release.
In Wait Softly Brother, I extend this to freedom from the constraints of the marriage contract — a contract that we sign but never read, that we never actually get a copy of, and that commits us until we die. Freedom is not incompatible with parenthood if you are the sort of person who finds freedom in service to others in that way. For me it was a mixed bag. I love my children and I loved my husband, but at some point the burden started to feel like I was sacrificing myself entirely to it. I do think that in some cases it is possible to rebuild from the inside, to therapy your way into a new marital structure — make a new story for your family.
For Kathryn the structure that exists is too airtight to change. She is changing, exceeding her current narrative, but the players inside that existing structure won’t budge. Her webbed fingers are a reminder of who she is. It’s lucky she has this older story written on her body because it scribes her into a lineage of womenfolk who were marked for freedom. The water rises in the novel to meet her needs, even as the world floods.
CFG: I love that idea, that someone can be marked by freedom for “different imaginings,” as you said earlier. They’re chaos agents in the way that artists can be when at their best.
I am concerned about AI like ChatGPT or DALL-E for this reason. If we allow robots to do the work of creative writing, art making, we lose a lot. We lose our habit of disrupting the social order in healthy ways. And this loss worries me because without our artists agitating the rules — of language, imagery, the sonic (music, poetry), architecture — we will lose the ability to change those rules.
Robots can’t really do creative work. This is because they can’t exceed what already exists. Not really. They can make things from collaging what already exists. So, we might see interesting looking work but not work that asks the world to evolve. And true art is never solely decorative.
CHRISTINE FISCHER GUY is a Toronto writer and journalist who was awarded a fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in 2021 for work on her second novel. Her debut novel, The Umbrella Mender, appeared in 2014, and her short fiction has been published in Canadian, American, and British journals. She won a National Magazine Award for her profile of Métis activist Chelsea Vowel and contributes to the Los Angeles Review of Books and the Globe and Mail.