Podcast appearances and mentions of Sheila Heti

RENCONTRES - Catherine Schwaab reçoit : Marie Mahé, auteur et metteure en scène de "Viril(e )s", Benoît Solès, acteur, auteur et metteur en scène, "22 minutes, le pardon peut-il changer une vie ?", François Kasbi, auteur de "Mes chéries" Maria de Medeiros, actrice, metteur en scène. À propos du livre : « Mes chéries: Femmes écrivains » paru aux éditions PARIS "L'homme de sa vie, la femme de ses rêves - et une fois de plus, la vie gâche le scénario" : Joseph L. Mankiewicz a en partie raison, il a juste oublié... les livres. Qui corrigent, parfois, la vie. Parfois en effet, "la femme de ses rêves" - c'est-à-dire l'écrivain femme qui nous comble - existe. Elle a écrit. François Kasbi s'en souvient. Voici ses souvenirs de lectures de ces « femmes de ses rêves ». Qui ont construit, habité... ses rêves - et sa vie. Et, bientôt (nous l'espérons) : la vôtre. Quelles femmes écrivains ? Une centaine d'évocations ou portraits : des connues, voire classiques (Virginia Woolf, Elsa Morante, Sylvia Plath, Anna Akhmatova, Clarice Lispector, Elfriede Jelinek, Nathalie Sarraute, etc. ), des méconnues (les plus nombreuses, bien sûr : Maile Meloy, Soledad Puertolas, Sheila Heti, Eimar McBride, Ann Beattie, etc. ), des reconnues (Camille Laurens, Dominique Aury, Joan Didion, Catherine Cusset, etc.). Tantôt le charme est convoqué, tantôt le génie, parfois les deux - mais, tout le temps : la littérature.

Lisa Robertson’s Riverwork twins the mysterious disappearance of the great aunt of our protagonist, Lucy Frost, and that same aunt’s interest in a long-disappeared river, buried under the streets of Paris. As Lucy searches for traces of her aunt, by attempting to inhabit and complete her work on this long-forgotten river, erased histories about both come to the surface. Today’s unforgettable conversation—whether when talking about laundry or linguistics, text or textile, dust or menses, archivists or troubadours—floods designation, spills over with newly daylighted significations. For the bonus audio archive Lisa introduces us to and reads her translation of “Hags,” the long poem by Charles Baudelaire that is a germ for both of her novels, The Baudelaire Fractal and Riverwork. This joins many contributions from past guests including Dionne Brand, Christina Sharpe, Canisia Lubrin, Sheila Heti, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Bhanu Kapil, Kate Zambreno, Sofia Samatar and many more. To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio and about the many other potential benefits and rewards of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener support, head over to the show’s Patreon page. Finally here is the robust and wide-ranging BookShop for today’s conversation.

This podcast is about testing the limits of fairness. It's about taking to heart the meaning behind "Beyond the Pale" — a phrase referring to ideas that are so outrageous it's impossible to deal with them in reasonable terms. Follow IDEAS producer Tom Howell as he covers uncomfortable terrain. When the time for ‘open-mindedness' stops and prejudices become — possibly — a good thing. *This is the final episode in a series tackling the implications of bias. It originally aired on on June 8, 2022.Guests in this episode:Eduardo Mendieta is a philosophy professor at Pennsylvania State University. He edited the final book by Richard Rorty, Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism.Barbara Kay is a columnist at The National Post and The Epoch Times.Misha Glouberman is co-author (with Sheila Heti) of The Chairs Are Where the People Go. He runs a negotiation course called How to Talk to People About Things.Rahim Mohamed is a freelance writer and college instructor at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. His opinion columns are published in the online newsletter, The Line.Anne-Marie Pham is an executive director of the Canadian Centre for Diversity and Inclusion.Michael Bacon is a political theorist at Royal Holloway, University of London. His books include Pragmatism: An Introduction.Martin Zibauer is from the Cosburn Park Lawn Bowling Club in Toronto, Ontario.

“Fiction has this unprecedented power in tech spaces. The more I started talking to engineers about their technical problems, the more I realized there’s so much more that humanities could offer.” –Nina Begus About Nina Begus Nina Begus is a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, leading a research group on artificial humanities, and the founder of InterpretAI. She is author of Artificial Humanities: A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI, which received an Artificiality Institute Award, and First Encounters with AI. Webiste: ninabegus.com LinkedIn Profile: Nina Begus  Book: Artificial Humanities What you will learn How ancient myths and archetypes influence our understanding and design of AI Why the humanities—literature, philosophy, and the arts—are crucial for developing more thoughtful and innovative AI systems The dangers of limiting AI concepts to human-centered metaphors and the need for new, more expansive imaginaries How metaphors shape our interactions with AI products and the user experiences companies choose to enable The challenges and possibilities of imagining forms of machine intelligence and language beyond human templates Why collaboration between technical experts and humanists opens new frontiers for creativity and responsible technology What makes writing and artistic creation uniquely human, and how AI amplifies—not replaces—these impulses Practical ways artists, engineers, and thinkers can work together to explore new relationships and futures with AI Episode Resources Transcript Ross Dawson: Nina, it is wonderful to have you on the show. Nina Begus: Thank you for having me. Ross Dawson: You’ve written this very interesting book, Artificial Humanities, and I think there’s a lot to dig into. But what does that mean? What do you mean by artificial humanities? Nina Begus: Well, this was really a new framework that I’ve developed while I was working on the relationship between AI and fiction, and I started working on this about 15 years ago when I realized that fiction has this unprecedented power in tech spaces. So this is how it all started, but then the more I started talking to engineers about their technical problems, the more I realized there’s so much more that humanities could offer in this collaborative, generative approach that I’ve developed. I would say that now, as the field stands, it’s really a way to explore and demonstrate how humanities—as broad as science and technology studies, literary studies, film, philosophy, rhetoric, history of technology—how all of these fields can help us address the most pressing issues in AI development and use. And it’s been important to me that this approach uses traditional humanistic methods, theory, conceptual work, history, ethical approaches, but also that it’s collaborative and exploratory and experimental in this way that you can look back into the past and at the present to make a more informed choice about the future. You can speculate about different possibilities with it. Ross Dawson: Well, art is an expression of the human psyche, or even more, it is the fullest expression of humanity, and that’s what art tries to do. Also, I’m a deep believer in archetypes, human archetypes, and things which are intrinsic to who we are, and that’s something which you can only really uncover through the arts. Now we have arguably seen all these archetypes play out in real time, these modern myths being created right now in the stories being told of how AI is being created. So I think it’s extraordinarily relevant to look back at how we have depicted machines through our history and our relationship to them. Nina Begus: Yes, this is the reason why I started exploring this topic, actually, because there were so many ancient myths, these archetypal narratives that I’ve seen at the same time, both in technological products that were coming to the market and in the way technologists were thinking about it, and also in fictional products and films and novels in the way we imagined AI. I framed my book around the Pygmalion myth, but there are many, many other myths—Prometheus, Narcissus, the Big Brother narrative, and so on—that are very much doing work in the AI space. The reason why I chose the Pygmalion myth is because it’s so bizarre in many ways: you have this myth where a man creates an artificial woman, and then in the process of creation, falls in love with her. So there’s the creation of the human-like, and there’s also this relationality with the human-like. You would think this would not be a common myth, but quite the opposite—I found it everywhere I looked. It wasn’t called the Pygmalion myth, but the motif was there. I found it on the Silk Road, in ancient folk tales, in Native American folk tales, North Africa, and so on. So I think this kind of story is actually telling us a lot about how humans are not rational, how we have some very deeply embedded behaviors in us, and one of them is that we anthropomorphize everything, including machines.So I think this was a really important takeaway that we got already from the early days of AI with the first chatbot, Eliza. We’ve learned that that will be a feature of us relating to machines. Ross Dawson: So Joseph Campbell called the hero’s journey the monomyth, as in, there is a single myth. And I guess what you are doing here is—well, if you agree with that, which I’d be interested in—is that there are facets. The classic hero’s journey is quite simple, but there are facets of that monomyth, or something intrinsic to who we are, that is around this creation. And in this case, as you say, this relation we have with what we have created. Would you relate that at all to Joseph Campbell’s work? Nina Begus: I haven’t thought about it in this way, because I thought about myth and myths more and less of a storytelling issue, which here is definitely happening—the hero goes on a task, returns back changed, and maybe changes something in the community. The myths that I was looking into and the metaphors that I was exploring, primarily this huge metaphor of AI as a human mind, as an artificial reason—I think it works differently. It’s less of a narrative; it’s more of an imaginary of how or towards what we are building. I think this is a big problem, actually, because the imaginary around AI is very poor. What you get is mostly imagining machine intelligence on human terms, and a lot of people are bothered by that in the AI discourse—right, when you say the machine thinks, or the machine learns, or it has a mind, and some people go as far as to say it has consciousness. I think this kind of debate is actually not that productive. I think it’s more important to see how all these different AI products that we’ve created—and mostly when we talk about AI, people think of language models now—are very much designed as a sort of character, almost as an artificial human that, in literature, authors have been creating for a long time. So I think in that case, we can get back to a hero’s journey. But I think what I was looking at was actually more on the surface level of what kind of shortcuts we are using with these metaphors that we’re employing when building and using AI. I think the book makes a really good case showing that, yes, this is actually a very cultural technology. It’s very much informed by our imaginaries. One surprising part of it was really how hard it was to break out of this human mold. It was pretty much impossible to find examples of machines that are not exclusively human-like. I think Stanislaw Lem is one of the rare writers who can consistently deliver this kind of imaginary. Even looking at more recent works, like popular films such as Hollywood’s Ex Machina or Her, you can see how the technologists themselves would say, “Oh, we were influenced by this film,” in a way that it affirmed their product development trajectory. You can see it now, at this moment, with OpenAI launching companionship. So in many ways, not a lot has changed. Ross Dawson: Yeah, there’s a lot to dig into there. I just want to go back—in a sense, Pygmalion is a metaphor, but it’s also a myth. It is a story: creates a woman, and then falls in love with her, and then whatever happens from there. There is this, something happens, and then something else happens. That’s what a story is. I think that can impact the implicit metaphor, but coming back to the metaphor—so George Lakoff wrote the beautiful book Metaphors We Live By. I think the way the brain works is in metaphors and analogies to a very large degree. Some of those are enabling metaphors, and some of those are not very useful metaphors. I think part of your point is that some of the metaphors that we have for thinking about AI and machines are not useful. There may be, or we could create, some metaphors that are more useful. So, what are some of the most disabling metaphors, and what are some of the ones which could be more constructive? Nina Begus: Yes, So I think this main metaphor that I’ve mentioned—of AI as a human mind—is very limiting. I think it really limits the machinic potential to actually do something good with it. The fact that we’re still using the criteria that were made for humans, like different criteria developed on human language—the Turing test was one of them, right, a while ago. Now we have stricter ones. I think this tells you a lot about how we actually evaluate AI and how even these benchmarks that are supposed to be quantitative are actually often qualitative, often stories, like mini-narratives. But yeah, when we look at different metaphors in this space, there are other ones that also emerge from fiction. I mentioned the Big Brother, the AI as an Oracle, and we need to be aware that these ideas inform the very interaction we have with AI. If we think of it as a mirror, we’re going to use it differently—it’s almost as a bouncing board. If we think of it as a teacher, or as a coach, or as an assistant, it would again create a different use. So I think there are a lot of these metaphors that the companies themselves are trying to decide which one they will go with, because it completely changes the user and the interaction. I think they’re also very cultural, even though you might say, “Oh, it’s a categorical mistake to treat a machine as a human.” I think you can see this kind of treatment across, at least in part, and it doesn’t mean that we consider it human. It just means that we’re engaging with it on our own terms, as if it was human. Now, what could be productive? I do think metaphors, even if they’re not accurate, can be productive. My goal, really, with the book was to break out of this projection of what the machine could be, to find in this exploratory way other directions, other landscapes where we couldn’t go because we’re being limited by our imaginary, by our ideas. So in this way, I think humanistic approaches can be very helpful to designers, to technology builders, to artists, to explore the novelty that so many of these sectors are after. Ross Dawson: Yeah, and I guess people latch on to what they know. I think that’s part of the thing where with AI, “Oh, it’s like a human. Let’s treat it like a human, and let’s make it like a human.” It is, amongst other things, a lack of imagination. That’s where the humanities, the arts, can offer us—those who have the imagination to be able to envisage different possibilities or relationships. But I guess part of it is also that humans relate, and so we have learned to relate to other humans and also to other animals and hopefully to nature as well. But these are all established patterns of relating. So do we need to discover in ourselves new ways of relating to new categories—things which are not humans, not animals, and not nature? Nina Begus: Exactly, this is the exact problem we’re dealing with, and because we’re dealing with a yet unexplored, yet undefined relation, and we’re using old, outdated terms for that relation. This is why we don’t really have a good way of describing it and establishing it. It will take a while for this to develop, which is fine, but we need to realize that there are some concepts that we’re using that we better leave behind and go ahead by building new ones. This is why I think it’s really important to work in a more interdisciplinary collaboration, so that you can see what you can actually build from the technical perspective, so that you can see what these machines are actually capable of. Because you usually don’t know when you create them right?Machine learning is sort of exploratory by design. Ross Dawson: So, just to call it out more explicitly, what are the metaphors you think are the most destructive or most inappropriate, and what are some of the ones which you think are the most promising? Nina Begus: Well, I’m just writing on the Midas myth, which is sort of the opposite of the Pygmalion myth. With Pygmalion, you lean into that human imitation, but with Midas, you lean into the liminality that Midas presents as this sort of hybrid creature. I think leaning into the boundaries that we draw for ourselves—and now AI is not cooperating with them—this is where the productive part will be in actually creating something that has philosophical dignity, but also a kind of productive trajectory for the machines to go. I feel like we’re still in this first phase of developing AI, because when you look at it historically, we haven’t really moved from the conceptual and philosophical premises that were established in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s for this technology. We have now gotten the technology that caught up to the ideas from the 60s, but we’re still stuck in the same conceptual space. Ross Dawson: Yeah, very much so. And, you know, of course, what is AGI, which everyone talks about, is basically—the only way in which people seem to be able to frame it is as relative to humans, which is the only reference point we have. I mean, there’s, of course, animal intelligence, but that’s because of that. It is, again, that lack of imagination—saying, “Well, intelligence, oh, intelligence is what humans do, so let’s do something which is the same as that,” whereas there’s so much white space in what intelligence could be. I think this almost comes back to definition. When people say intelligence, the word, when they use the word intelligence, they are referring to what humans do. It’s not a general term, and so it all becomes a language problem as well, because we are so rooted to relating our language to human capabilities, as opposed to a more general potential. Nina Begus: Yes, I think you’re really on to something here, because I can see it also—because I work with animal communication researchers, and we’re finding things there that we didn’t find because we limited ourselves to thinking language is just a human production, that it needs a human subject. Now, as soon as we got rid of this presumption, we’re finding new things, things that are basically parallel to what we do in our language. So language is in a space of tension because it’s being attacked both from the animal side and from the machinic side, which is why I really focused on language in this book. It’s not a coincidence that we centered artificial intelligence in language as the interface, because this is how we relate to the world—this is our interface to talk to each other, to understand each other. I think the fact that language is coming under such pressure as an interface brings with it a lot of other concepts that are being challenged. Are only humans creative? Is there a natural creativity, machinic creativity? Is there a different kind of intelligence that’s maybe solely biological, embodied? How do we think about cognition? How do we think about culture? In AI and in the natural world, there’s so much that comes with it: agency, autonomy, freedom, community, which I think we will be grappling with for the next few decades, at least. Ross Dawson: I think you alluded before to the potential for AI to have its own languages.  Nina Begus: I’ts happening already. The reason why I like Stanislaw Lem so much is because he can actually think about a machine—back in the 1970s, he’s doing that—about a machine that’s not human-like, that’s not limited to human language. It is trained on human language, but then it goes its own way, where the human linguistic ceiling just cannot go anymore. We’re already seeing that in the models, in Berkeley’s Biological Artificial Intelligence Lab, in the models that are not large language models, but generative adversarial networks that are based on speech. We see that as they are learning the words, they are encoding some information into silences that we don’t know what it is. I think what’s really exciting to me are two things about language in machines. The first one is, what is this non-human production of language? We did not think that non-humans can produce language, even though we had parrots who had to crawl their way to us to speak in “humanese,” to show that they have some kind of intelligence—even if it’s just parroting, even if it’s just what we call imitation, which some people consider not to be intelligence. We’ve had these examples before, but now it’s gotten nuclear—on this scale that LLMs are performing, it’s really challenged a lot of our solely human attributes: creativity, storytelling. A lot of journalists come to me because there’s this existential fear of machines taking over their work and so on. So we’ve been thinking about those things, and now it’s actually happening. Ross Dawson: One of the other key points here, I think, is that humanity is—the arts—there’s so much, as you mentioned, in terms of fiction, in terms of films, in terms of visual arts, and many other artistic domains. We have reference points that we use, and the amount which people refer to the movie Her in the last years is pretty extraordinary, partly because it’s obviously coming very much true. I think the Ex Machina story is very interesting as well, as are many others in the past. But there is also this act of imagination. There are people who have written these books, who have crafted these films, who have created these things, and they are the ones who have been not just manifesting our human psyche, but also pushing that out and coming up with ideas which others haven’t had, to give us something. So one thing we can certainly do is mine and dig into what has been created. But is there a way to interface through this to this act of imagining, which can give us new artifacts and ways of thinking and ways of relating? Nina Begus: Yes, I think imagination and humanities in general are going to become more and more important, because AI will do a lot of technical work, but imaginaries—this is what we really excel at. It’s actually interesting to see how you think fiction is this unbounded landscape where you can imagine anything, and yet it’s really hard to find examples of machines that are beyond the human. Even these writers, like the screenwriters for Her and Ex Machina, create these completely Pygmalion-esque films, where you have an artificial woman leading a relationship with a human man, and so on. For the whole film, you have her act as a human-like entity. But then at the end of each of those films—well, particularly in Her—Spike Jonze really tried to break out of this and show her AI side. Basically, there was no language to describe it, so he resorted to a metaphor—the metaphor of a book, where Samantha, the operations assistant, explains that her world is falling apart, like the way words are floating further and further apart in a book. That’s how she’s able to describe it; that’s the closest she gets. And then in Ex Machina, Alex Garland really wanted to portray the world from the social robot Ava’s perspective in a visual way. He wrote down a scene, but he said, “I failed to execute it visually. I just couldn’t do it well.” So instead, he gave us a different scene that’s shot from afar, where Ava embarks onto a helicopter and she has to undergo her Turing test—the helicopter pilot cannot recognize her as a robot; he needs to think she’s a human woman. There have been attempts, I think even in Garland’s next film Annihilation, they’re trying to set the grounds for something that’s entirely new and hard to imagine. I think a big takeaway for us is this is very hard to do. Ross Dawson: Yes, well, given that context, I do want to—as in the human plus AI framing—given all of this, what is it that we can do or should be doing in order to amplify our humanity, our capabilities, the positive aspects of what it is to be human? How can we relate to or use AI in order to amplify the best of us? Nina Begus: Yeah, I actually had, while I was writing the book Artificial Humanities, this other dream project to work with writers—professional writers, creatives, people who live in a world of words—to see what they make of AI. I waited a little bit for the public’s polarized reactions to calm down a bit and gathered 16 writers, some of whom already made a space for themselves in the field, like Sheila Heti and Ken Liu and Ted Chiang, and then some of the more junior writers who I knew were thinking about that—a Netflix screenwriter, and so on. I gathered them to see—I think the creative people are really the answer here—I gathered them to see how they approach this very human part of the new human and AI collaboration zone. What was common across a lot of essays that are coming out in October under the title “First Encounters with AI” is this argument that, well, AI doesn’t have subjectivity, it doesn’t have emotions, it doesn’t have a body, it doesn’t have experience, it doesn’t have meaning—all of these things that really make us human, all of these parts that actually make art compelling and literature compelling. So Ken Liu’s argument, for example, was, let’s leave machines what they’re good at—they’re good at imitating and copying—and we’re good at interpreting, we’re good at creating and imagining. I think this is really a way to go with this. This catastrophizing that’s very present in the public discourse, I think, is a bit misleading. I wish we had a more nuanced approach to what’s actually happening, particularly in the space of writing. Obviously, AI is a groundbreaking technology that affects pretty much every one of us and all the sectors, but when it comes to writing, we just don’t think it’s killable. We think that there’s this perennial impulse that humans have to play with language, and that is not going to go away with AI. We’re just going to amplify it through AI, through this new possibility that has now opened in many ways. I like to think about AI as—you know, we’ve figured out how to fly. As soon as we figured out the physics of flight, we had planes and helicopters and drones and kites, and these are the new possibilities for human activities. In the same way, we figured out the machine learning principles, and now we have large language models and diffusion models, and we have GANs and so on, and there will be more. These are the new spaces of possibility that have opened for our activities, for our spirit to work on, but they do not replace the human in a meaningful way. It’s more about extension than it is about automation. Ross Dawson: Yeah, that’s a wonderful way of framing it. So where can people go to find out more about your work? Nina Begus: I have a pretty populated website with my name, ninabegus.com, where I write about my books, I write about my public work. I have videos on there, podcasts, links, and so on. I also have a pretty lively lab with a lot of collaborators and students, where a lot of what I imagined when writing Artificial Humanities—where a lot of collaborative projects happen. We have artists, we have engineers, we have philosophers that work on the same question, but come at it from very different backgrounds and with very different skills. I think this is becoming more and more important in the world of AI. Ross Dawson: Yes, yes, bringing all of those disciplines and frames and thinking together. That’s wonderful. I love what you’re doing—very important. I hope the messages ripple through, and obviously wonderful to be able to share this with the Humans Plus AI audience. Thank you so much. Nina Begus: Thank you, Ross, and thank you all for listening. The post Nina Begus on artificial humanities, AI archetypes, limiting and productive metaphors, and human extension (AC Ep38) appeared first on Humans + AI.

Name: Indira PriscillaReading: Alphabetical Diaries, Sheila HetiWhy did you want to read this? I chose this book because I love how poetic the fragmentation of thoughts can be and love how Heiti did a copy-paste technique using a decade of her own journals. I find it a very brave and vulnerable act that somehow shows the very subtle yet powerful truth that lie in every day life.How did you record yourself? I read this under a red warm light sitting in my friend's room. It was art week at that time, I was tired after a hectic day of gallery hopping and it was very reliving and relaxing reading something I like a lot for the first time out loud. 

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for January 11, 2026 is: paradox • PAIR-uh-dahks • noun Paradox refers to something (such as a situation) that is made up of two opposite things and that seems impossible but is actually true or possible. It can also refer to someone who does two seemingly opposite things or who has qualities that are opposite; to a statement that seems to say two opposite things but that nonetheless may be true; or to the use of such statements in writing or speech. // It is a paradox that computers need time-consuming updates so often, since they are meant to save people time. // As an actor, she's a paradox—she loves being in the spotlight but fiercely guards her privacy. See the entry > Examples: “In some ways, I think the idea of a ‘serious lady' might even be a paradox, if to be serious means to understand the world according to one's own precepts, experiences, and observations, and to behave in a way that reflects this. A lady, on the other hand, follows rules that others have devised. How, then, can a ‘serious lady' be anything other than a very peculiar and odd creature—which the women in this book certainly are?” — Sheila Heti, from the introduction to Two Serious Ladies: A Novel by Jane Bowles, 2025 (orig. 1943) Did you know? The ancient Greeks were well aware that a paradox—the saying “less is more,” for example—can take us outside our usual way of thinking. They combined the prefix para-, “beyond” or “outside of,” with the verb dokein, “to think,” forming paradoxos, an adjective meaning “contrary to expectation.” Latin speakers used that word as the basis for a noun paradoxum, which English speakers borrowed during the 1500s as paradox.

En el programa de hoy nos detenemos en vidas que se salen del marco, en decisiones que no siempre son visibles y en la escritura como forma de pensar(se).Abrimos con Personas Curvas, la sección de Víctor Clares (Ladilla Rusa), que hoy nos presenta a María Victoria de Molins, conocida como la monja de la calle. Una figura radical y poco convencional que ha dedicado su vida a estar donde casi nadie mira: junto a personas en situación de exclusión social, desde una fe vivida como compromiso cotidiano y sin espectáculo. Una historia que cuestiona las fronteras entre religión, activismo y presencia real en los márgenes.Después charlamos con Ana Merino por su novela El camino que no elegimos. Un retrato íntimo de una mujer de cincuenta años que, tras una ruptura inesperada, se ve obligada a revisar las decisiones tomadas, las renuncias asumidas y los futuros que nunca llegaron a ser. Una conversación sobre la madurez, la fragilidad y la reconstrucción sin épica, desde lo cotidiano y lo honesto.Cerramos el programa con Barra Libre, de Aloma Rodríguez, dedicada esta vez a los diarios de Sheila Heti. Casi una década de escritura íntima en la que la autora reflexiona sobre el trabajo, el deseo, la identidad, la creación y la duda como forma de estar en el mundo. Un libro que convierte el pensamiento en materia literaria y la incertidumbre en método.Escuchar audio

Cerramos el programa con Barra Libre, de Aloma Rodríguez, dedicada esta vez a los diarios de Sheila Heti. Casi una década de escritura íntima en la que la autora reflexiona sobre el trabajo, el deseo, la identidad, la creación y la duda como forma de estar en el mundo. Un libro que convierte el pensamiento en materia literaria y la incertidumbre en método.Escuchar audio

Llegim els "Diaris alfab

'I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train' wrote Oscar Wilde, in the Importance of Being Ernest. In this episode Kate is joined by critic, editor and podcaster Lucy Scholes and regular pod guest Phil Chaffee to explore the intimate world of diaries. Can immersing ourselves in the details of other people's lives offer us valuable insight into how to fully appreciate the passing moments of our own? From gossipy self-mythologising Samuel Pepys right up to the present with the experimentation of Sheila Heti's Alphabetical Diaries, and the beauty and hard-won insight of Helen Garner's Baillie Gifford prize-winning diaries. Also not to be missed, living it up Vanity Fair style through the glitz and glamour of 80s New York, with Tina Brown.And if you enjoy this conversation don't miss Part II, over on the Patreon, where we swap notes on our favourite fictional diaries, consider the diaries we'd love to read if they had only been published and share some thoughts on our own diary keeping. You'll find that episode plus lots of benefits including ad-free listening, extra episodes, our community of readers and the pod book club over at patreon.com/thebookclubreview.And to take advantage of that Serious Readers offer of £150 off any HD light head to serious readers.com/bcr and use the code BCR at checkout.Book listThe Private Life of the Diary by Sally BayleyThe Paris ReviewThey by Kay DickLord Jim at Home by Dinah BrookeLove Life of a Cheltenham Lady by Dinah BrookePart of the Story by Margaret BusbyWoman Alive by Susan ErtzShow Don't Tell by Curtis SittenfeldSome People Need Killing by Patricia EvangelistaLook Closer by Robert Douglas FairhurstThe Correspondent by Virginia EvansThe Diary of Samuel Pepys, Robert Latham (ed)The Diaries of Virginia WoolfHow To End a Story by Helen GarnerHenry Chips Channon: The DiariesThe James Lees Milne diariesWriting Home by Alan BennettThere and Back: 1999–2009 by Michael PalinThe Vanity Fair Diaries 1983–1992 by Tina BrownEnd of a Berlin Diary by William L. ShirerWar in Val D'Orcia by Iris OrigoRussian Journal by Andrea LeeBeloved Son Felix: Coming of Age in the Renaissance by Felix PlatterDiary of a Tuscan Bookshop by Alba DonatiModern Nature by Derek JarmanPharmacopeia by Derek JarmanWent to London, Took the Dog by Nina StibbeAlphabetical Diaries by Sheila HetiA Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane RitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

We have a special episode for you today! In which Nate and Maria join their fellow Pushkin hosts to dive deep into the art of failure. Tim Harford of Cautionary Tales shares stories of minor mistakes with massive consequences. Jonathan Goldstein of Heavyweight speaks with his friend, the writer Sheila Heti about the cost of mistakes and whether we're really in control of how many we make. And, our very own Nate and Maria give a gambler's take on the strange science of regret. Cautionary Tales and Heavyweight are available wherever you get your podcasts.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Our Writer to Writer series returns for a second season. This episode features a conversation between Sheila Heti and Vivian Gornick—the writers talk writing from life, divorce novels, the feminist movement, constructing sentences, and more. . . . Source

Kanadská spisovatelka Sheila Heti na jednotlivé věty rozstříhala své deníkové zápisky, které si vedla deset let. A věty poskládala podle abecedy. Jak to dopadlo? O tom si povídají v nové epizodě Litu Honza Dlouhý s Evou Soukeníkovou.

Patrick McGraw is the editor and publisher of Heavy Traffic magazine. Based in NYC, designed by Richard Turley and featuring contributions as varied as Sheila Heti, Keller Easterling and Dean Kissick, Heavy Traffic understands and reflects the mood of contemporary life in a way that fiction is increasingly well suited to. Literature has the ability to capture our now terminally online consciousness. Architecture, on the other hand—a cultural form that once stood for whole epochs—has in recent decades become anachronistic, divorced from the virtual world that increasingly holds us captive. Patrick's trajectory is interesting because he originally studied architecture before making a shift into journalism and eventually leading a literary magazine. In our conversation we try to bridge this gap between the world of architecture and fiction. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In an essay about her recent book Searches (Pantheon, 2025), a genre-bending chronicle of the deeply personal ways we use the internet and the uncanny ways it uses us, Vauhini Vara admits that several reviewers seemed to mistake her engagement with ChatGPT as an uncritical embrace of large language models. Enter Aarthi Vadde to talk with Vauhini about the power and the danger of digital tech and discuss to what it means to co-create with AI. Vauhini tells Aarthi and host Sarah Wasserman that at the heart of all her work is a desire to communicate—that “language,” as she says, “is the main tool we have to bridge the divide.” She explains that the motivation in Searches as in her journalism is to test out tools that promise new forms of communication—or even tools that promise to be able to communicate themselves. Amidst all her interest in new tech, Vauhini is first and foremost a writer: she and Aarthi discuss what it means to put ChatGPT on the printed page, what genre means in today's media ecosystem, and whether generative AI will steal writers' paychecks. Considering generative AI models as tools that “don't have a perspective,” makes for an episode that diagnoses the future of writing with much less doomsaying than authors and critics often bring to the topic. And if all of this writing with robots sounds too “out there,” stay tuned for Vauhini's down-to-earth answer to our signature question. Mentioned in this episode: Vauhini Vara, Searches (2025), The Immortal King Rao (2022), “My Decade in Google Searches” (2019) Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays (1580) Tom Comitta, The Nature Book (2023) Sheila Heti, Alphabetical Diaries (2024), “According to Alice” (2023) Audre Lorde, “The Master's Tools will never Dismantle the Master's House” (1979) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In an essay about her recent book Searches (Pantheon, 2025), a genre-bending chronicle of the deeply personal ways we use the internet and the uncanny ways it uses us, Vauhini Vara admits that several reviewers seemed to mistake her engagement with ChatGPT as an uncritical embrace of large language models. Enter Aarthi Vadde to talk with Vauhini about the power and the danger of digital tech and discuss to what it means to co-create with AI. Vauhini tells Aarthi and host Sarah Wasserman that at the heart of all her work is a desire to communicate—that “language,” as she says, “is the main tool we have to bridge the divide.” She explains that the motivation in Searches as in her journalism is to test out tools that promise new forms of communication—or even tools that promise to be able to communicate themselves. Amidst all her interest in new tech, Vauhini is first and foremost a writer: she and Aarthi discuss what it means to put ChatGPT on the printed page, what genre means in today's media ecosystem, and whether generative AI will steal writers' paychecks. Considering generative AI models as tools that “don't have a perspective,” makes for an episode that diagnoses the future of writing with much less doomsaying than authors and critics often bring to the topic. And if all of this writing with robots sounds too “out there,” stay tuned for Vauhini's down-to-earth answer to our signature question. Mentioned in this episode: Vauhini Vara, Searches (2025), The Immortal King Rao (2022), “My Decade in Google Searches” (2019) Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays (1580) Tom Comitta, The Nature Book (2023) Sheila Heti, Alphabetical Diaries (2024), “According to Alice” (2023) Audre Lorde, “The Master's Tools will never Dismantle the Master's House” (1979) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In an essay about her recent book Searches (Pantheon, 2025), a genre-bending chronicle of the deeply personal ways we use the internet and the uncanny ways it uses us, Vauhini Vara admits that several reviewers seemed to mistake her engagement with ChatGPT as an uncritical embrace of large language models. Enter Aarthi Vadde to talk with Vauhini about the power and the danger of digital tech and discuss to what it means to co-create with AI. Vauhini tells Aarthi and host Sarah Wasserman that at the heart of all her work is a desire to communicate—that “language,” as she says, “is the main tool we have to bridge the divide.” She explains that the motivation in Searches as in her journalism is to test out tools that promise new forms of communication—or even tools that promise to be able to communicate themselves. Amidst all her interest in new tech, Vauhini is first and foremost a writer: she and Aarthi discuss what it means to put ChatGPT on the printed page, what genre means in today's media ecosystem, and whether generative AI will steal writers' paychecks. Considering generative AI models as tools that “don't have a perspective,” makes for an episode that diagnoses the future of writing with much less doomsaying than authors and critics often bring to the topic. And if all of this writing with robots sounds too “out there,” stay tuned for Vauhini's down-to-earth answer to our signature question. Mentioned in this episode: Vauhini Vara, Searches (2025), The Immortal King Rao (2022), “My Decade in Google Searches” (2019) Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays (1580) Tom Comitta, The Nature Book (2023) Sheila Heti, Alphabetical Diaries (2024), “According to Alice” (2023) Audre Lorde, “The Master's Tools will never Dismantle the Master's House” (1979) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In an essay about her recent book Searches (Pantheon, 2025), a genre-bending chronicle of the deeply personal ways we use the internet and the uncanny ways it uses us, Vauhini Vara admits that several reviewers seemed to mistake her engagement with ChatGPT as an uncritical embrace of large language models. Enter Aarthi Vadde to talk with Vauhini about the power and the danger of digital tech and discuss to what it means to co-create with AI. Vauhini tells Aarthi and host Sarah Wasserman that at the heart of all her work is a desire to communicate—that “language,” as she says, “is the main tool we have to bridge the divide.” She explains that the motivation in Searches as in her journalism is to test out tools that promise new forms of communication—or even tools that promise to be able to communicate themselves. Amidst all her interest in new tech, Vauhini is first and foremost a writer: she and Aarthi discuss what it means to put ChatGPT on the printed page, what genre means in today's media ecosystem, and whether generative AI will steal writers' paychecks. Considering generative AI models as tools that “don't have a perspective,” makes for an episode that diagnoses the future of writing with much less doomsaying than authors and critics often bring to the topic. And if all of this writing with robots sounds too “out there,” stay tuned for Vauhini's down-to-earth answer to our signature question. Mentioned in this episode: Vauhini Vara, Searches (2025), The Immortal King Rao (2022), “My Decade in Google Searches” (2019) Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays (1580) Tom Comitta, The Nature Book (2023) Sheila Heti, Alphabetical Diaries (2024), “According to Alice” (2023) Audre Lorde, “The Master's Tools will never Dismantle the Master's House” (1979) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Sheila Heti reads her story “The St. Alwynn Girls at Sea,” from the January 27, 2025, issue of the magazine. Heti is the author of eleven books, including the novel “Pure Colour,” which won the Governor General's Award in 2022, and “Alphabetical Diaries,” which was published last year. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Ya en el aire el septuagésimo tercer episodio de Cierra al libro al salir, el del jardín de los impostores. En él, os recomendamos diez libros que no hemos leído con el aplomo propio de un par de impostores y después jugamos a las adivinanzas literarias con muy poco éxito porque, aunque parezca que sabemos de libros, es todo impostura. ¡Ah! Acordaos de leer el cuento Los cantores, de Iván Turgénev, para poder desmenuzarlo en el próximo episodio. Lo podéis leer aquí https://encr.pw/lIuZO  Presentación: al principio. Recomendación de una web: minuto 4:00. En www.3books.co tienes un proyecto de entrevistas a escritores muy interesante. Recomendaciones literarias: minuto 6:00.  Las recomendaciones de Ana: Antártida (Claire Keegan), Niños muertos (Martin Amis), Los niños perdidos (Valeria Luiselli), El maravilloso viaje de Nils Holgersson (Selma Lagerlöff) y Todos nuestros ayeres (Natlia Ginzburg). Las recomendaciones de Fernando: Poeta X (Elizabeth Acevedo), El día de la liberación (George Saunders), Chicas muertas (Selva Almada), Diarios alfabéticos (Sheila Heti) y El salvaje (Guillermo Arriaga) Fernando se mete en un jardín por impostor: minuto 14:00. Adelantamos que al final sabe salir. Juego literario: minuto 20:00. Adelantamos que la victoria es para Ana. Despedida: al final. Puedes comprar los libros de los que te hablamos donde te apetezca, pero nosotros te sugerimos que lo hagas a través de una pequeña librería y que te dejes aconsejar por los libreros. La sintonía del programa es de Charles Matuschewski y el logo del programa de Ana Nuria Corral. Las cortinillas animadas son de Jara Vicente. La traducción sincronizada de Elvira Barrio Cualquier sugerencia o crítica, incluso malintencionada, la podéis enviar a hola@cierraellibroalsalir.com. Búscanos en facebook (sobre todo), o en twitter o en instagram o en youtube, prometemos contestar lo antes posible. Esto es todo por hoy. Dentro de un mes, otro episodio. ¡No te olvides! Cierra el libro al salir. #recomendacionesliterarias #relatos #literatura

After a seismic event leaves the world shattered, an unnamed narrator at the end of a mediocre acting career struggles to regain the ability to walk on ground that is in constant motion. When her alluring younger housemate, Tala, disappears, what had begun as an obsession grows into an impulse to kill, forcing the narrator to confront the meaning of the ruptures that have suddenly upended her life. The drive to find and eliminate Tala becomes an existential pursuit, leading back in time and out into a desolate, dust-covered city, where the narrator is targeted by charismatic “healing” ideologues with uncertain motives. Torn between a gnawing desire to reckon with the forces that have made her and an immediate need to find the stability to survive, she is forced to question familiar figurations of light, shadow, authenticity, resistance, and the limits of personal transformation in an alienated, alienating world. Darkly comic, deeply resonant, and hallucinatory in tone, An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth (Soft Skull, 2024) will appeal to readers of Annie Ernaux, Dionne Brand, and Sheila Heti. Anna's most recent book is Participation. A poet and a translator, Anna has won the James Laughlin Award for her poetry and shared the 2021 International Booker Prize with David Diop for his novel At Night All Blood is Black. A student of plants and herbalism, she is a member of the publishing collective Ugly Duckling Presse and a cofound of Bushel Collective. Recommended Books: Poupeh Missaghi, Sound Museum Renee Gladman, My Lesbian Novel Mari Ruti, A World of Fragile Things  Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After a seismic event leaves the world shattered, an unnamed narrator at the end of a mediocre acting career struggles to regain the ability to walk on ground that is in constant motion. When her alluring younger housemate, Tala, disappears, what had begun as an obsession grows into an impulse to kill, forcing the narrator to confront the meaning of the ruptures that have suddenly upended her life. The drive to find and eliminate Tala becomes an existential pursuit, leading back in time and out into a desolate, dust-covered city, where the narrator is targeted by charismatic “healing” ideologues with uncertain motives. Torn between a gnawing desire to reckon with the forces that have made her and an immediate need to find the stability to survive, she is forced to question familiar figurations of light, shadow, authenticity, resistance, and the limits of personal transformation in an alienated, alienating world. Darkly comic, deeply resonant, and hallucinatory in tone, An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth (Soft Skull, 2024) will appeal to readers of Annie Ernaux, Dionne Brand, and Sheila Heti. Anna's most recent book is Participation. A poet and a translator, Anna has won the James Laughlin Award for her poetry and shared the 2021 International Booker Prize with David Diop for his novel At Night All Blood is Black. A student of plants and herbalism, she is a member of the publishing collective Ugly Duckling Presse and a cofound of Bushel Collective. Recommended Books: Poupeh Missaghi, Sound Museum Renee Gladman, My Lesbian Novel Mari Ruti, A World of Fragile Things  Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

After a seismic event leaves the world shattered, an unnamed narrator at the end of a mediocre acting career struggles to regain the ability to walk on ground that is in constant motion. When her alluring younger housemate, Tala, disappears, what had begun as an obsession grows into an impulse to kill, forcing the narrator to confront the meaning of the ruptures that have suddenly upended her life. The drive to find and eliminate Tala becomes an existential pursuit, leading back in time and out into a desolate, dust-covered city, where the narrator is targeted by charismatic “healing” ideologues with uncertain motives. Torn between a gnawing desire to reckon with the forces that have made her and an immediate need to find the stability to survive, she is forced to question familiar figurations of light, shadow, authenticity, resistance, and the limits of personal transformation in an alienated, alienating world. Darkly comic, deeply resonant, and hallucinatory in tone, An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth (Soft Skull, 2024) will appeal to readers of Annie Ernaux, Dionne Brand, and Sheila Heti. Anna's most recent book is Participation. A poet and a translator, Anna has won the James Laughlin Award for her poetry and shared the 2021 International Booker Prize with David Diop for his novel At Night All Blood is Black. A student of plants and herbalism, she is a member of the publishing collective Ugly Duckling Presse and a cofound of Bushel Collective. Recommended Books: Poupeh Missaghi, Sound Museum Renee Gladman, My Lesbian Novel Mari Ruti, A World of Fragile Things  Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction

After a seismic event leaves the world shattered, an unnamed narrator at the end of a mediocre acting career struggles to regain the ability to walk on ground that is in constant motion. When her alluring younger housemate, Tala, disappears, what had begun as an obsession grows into an impulse to kill, forcing the narrator to confront the meaning of the ruptures that have suddenly upended her life. The drive to find and eliminate Tala becomes an existential pursuit, leading back in time and out into a desolate, dust-covered city, where the narrator is targeted by charismatic “healing” ideologues with uncertain motives. Torn between a gnawing desire to reckon with the forces that have made her and an immediate need to find the stability to survive, she is forced to question familiar figurations of light, shadow, authenticity, resistance, and the limits of personal transformation in an alienated, alienating world. Darkly comic, deeply resonant, and hallucinatory in tone, An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth (Soft Skull, 2024) will appeal to readers of Annie Ernaux, Dionne Brand, and Sheila Heti. Anna's most recent book is Participation. A poet and a translator, Anna has won the James Laughlin Award for her poetry and shared the 2021 International Booker Prize with David Diop for his novel At Night All Blood is Black. A student of plants and herbalism, she is a member of the publishing collective Ugly Duckling Presse and a cofound of Bushel Collective. Recommended Books: Poupeh Missaghi, Sound Museum Renee Gladman, My Lesbian Novel Mari Ruti, A World of Fragile Things  Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Welcome to the FINALE of Season 12! I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the acclaimed writer, Sheila Heti. Born in 1976 in Toronto, where she lives today, Heti is the author of eleven books, from novels to novellas, short stories and children's books. Most recently, her acclaimed books have included Alphabetical Diaries, that ordered a decade worth of diaries in alphabetical order; Pure Colour (2022), a novel that explores grief, art and time; Motherhood (2018), a meditation on whether or not to become a mother in a society that judges you whatever the outcome. Heti's writing is some of the most honest, thoughtful I've ever read, and throughout weaves in the broad subject of art, whether it be paintings or her protagonists' professions… Heti also wrote for the literary journal the Believer, and has conducted many long-form print interviews with writers and artists, including conversations with Joan Didion, Elena Ferrante, Agnes Varda, Sophie Calle, who are among some of the artists we are going to be, very excitingly, discussing today. -- THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION: https://www.famm.com/en/ https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037 Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic Music by Ben Wetherfield

Rapid-response electoral punditry is not our lane. So, while we gather our feelings and thoughts, Matthew hosts novelist Sheila Heti for a discussion of her encounter with A Course in Miracles, and what she discovered when she investigated its origin story for Harper's Magazine. Was Helen Schucman, the book's “scribe”, mentally ill? Was she unduly influenced by her boss at Columbia Medical School, William Thetford, who once worked for the CIA's MKUltra programme, and with whom she was clearly in love, even though he was gay? Were they dropping acid on assignment from Langley? Why was the initial dictation of the book so radically altered by its first editors? Why did Helen Schucman curse A Course in Miracles so soon after publication? Why did she keep writing trite poems to Jesus before dying in bitterness? Heti was the ideal gumshoe for this project, because as a novelist all-too-familiar with internal voices and the feeling of “channeling,” she was able to feel her way into Helen's life. Matthew asks her what she found. Show Notes The New Age Bible — Sheila Heti  Sheila Heti — website Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What happens when a novelist wants “nonsense and joy” but his characters are destined for a Central European sanatorium? How does the abecedarian form (i.e. organized not chronologically or sequentially but alphabetically) insist on order, yet also embrace absurdity? Here to ponder such questions with host John Plotz are University of Wisconsin–Madison's Sunny Yudkoff (last heard on ND speaking with Sheila Heti) and Adam Ehrlich Sachs, author of Inherited Disorders, The Organs of Sense, and the recently published Gretel and the Great War. Sachs has fallen under the spell of late Habsburg Vienna, where the polymath Ludwig Wittgenstein struggled to make sense of Boltzmann's physics, Arnold Schoenberg read the acerbic journalist Karl Kraus, and everyone, Sachs suspects, was reading Grimms' Fairy Tales, searching for the feeling of inevitability only narrative closure can provide. Beneath his OULIPO-like attachment to arbitrary orders and word-games, though, Sachs admits to a desire for chaos. Thomas Bernhard, later 20th century Austrian experimental novelist Heinrich von Kleist, “Michael Kohlhass” Romantic-era German writer Italo Calvino,If on a Winter's Night a Traveler OULIPO Home of French literary experimentalists like Perec and Raymond Queneau Georges Perec's most famous experiment is Life: A User's Manual (although John is devoted to “W: or the Memory of Childhood”) Dr. Seuss, On Beyond Zebra! (ignore John calling the author Dr Scarry, which was a scary mistake.,..) Marcel Proust: was he a worldbuilder and fantasist, as Nabokov says or, as Doris Lessing claims, principally an anatomist of French social structures, a second Zola? Franz Kafka is unafraid of turning his character into a bug in a story's first sentence. Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway offers the reader a mad (Septimus) and a sane (Mrs Dalloway herself) version of stream of consciousness: how different are they? Cezanne, for example The Fisherman (Fantastic Scene) The Pointillism of painters like Georges Seurat Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

What happens when a novelist wants “nonsense and joy” but his characters are destined for a Central European sanatorium? How does the abecedarian form (i.e. organized not chronologically or sequentially but alphabetically) insist on order, yet also embrace absurdity? Here to ponder such questions with host John Plotz are University of Wisconsin–Madison's Sunny Yudkoff (last heard on ND speaking with Sheila Heti) and Adam Ehrlich Sachs, author of Inherited Disorders, The Organs of Sense, and the recently published Gretel and the Great War. Sachs has fallen under the spell of late Habsburg Vienna, where the polymath Ludwig Wittgenstein struggled to make sense of Boltzmann's physics, Arnold Schoenberg read the acerbic journalist Karl Kraus, and everyone, Sachs suspects, was reading Grimms' Fairy Tales, searching for the feeling of inevitability only narrative closure can provide. Beneath his OULIPO-like attachment to arbitrary orders and word-games, though, Sachs admits to a desire for chaos. Thomas Bernhard, later 20th century Austrian experimental novelist Heinrich von Kleist, “Michael Kohlhass” Romantic-era German writer Italo Calvino,If on a Winter's Night a Traveler OULIPO Home of French literary experimentalists like Perec and Raymond Queneau Georges Perec's most famous experiment is Life: A User's Manual (although John is devoted to “W: or the Memory of Childhood”) Dr. Seuss, On Beyond Zebra! (ignore John calling the author Dr Scarry, which was a scary mistake.,..) Marcel Proust: was he a worldbuilder and fantasist, as Nabokov says or, as Doris Lessing claims, principally an anatomist of French social structures, a second Zola? Franz Kafka is unafraid of turning his character into a bug in a story's first sentence. Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway offers the reader a mad (Septimus) and a sane (Mrs Dalloway herself) version of stream of consciousness: how different are they? Cezanne, for example The Fisherman (Fantastic Scene) The Pointillism of painters like Georges Seurat Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What happens when a novelist wants “nonsense and joy” but his characters are destined for a Central European sanatorium? How does the abecedarian form (i.e. organized not chronologically or sequentially but alphabetically) insist on order, yet also embrace absurdity? Here to ponder such questions with host John Plotz are University of Wisconsin–Madison's Sunny Yudkoff (last heard on ND speaking with Sheila Heti) and Adam Ehrlich Sachs, author of Inherited Disorders, The Organs of Sense, and the recently published Gretel and the Great War. Sachs has fallen under the spell of late Habsburg Vienna, where the polymath Ludwig Wittgenstein struggled to make sense of Boltzmann's physics, Arnold Schoenberg read the acerbic journalist Karl Kraus, and everyone, Sachs suspects, was reading Grimms' Fairy Tales, searching for the feeling of inevitability only narrative closure can provide. Beneath his OULIPO-like attachment to arbitrary orders and word-games, though, Sachs admits to a desire for chaos. Thomas Bernhard, later 20th century Austrian experimental novelist Heinrich von Kleist, “Michael Kohlhass” Romantic-era German writer Italo Calvino,If on a Winter's Night a Traveler OULIPO Home of French literary experimentalists like Perec and Raymond Queneau Georges Perec's most famous experiment is Life: A User's Manual (although John is devoted to “W: or the Memory of Childhood”) Dr. Seuss, On Beyond Zebra! (ignore John calling the author Dr Scarry, which was a scary mistake.,..) Marcel Proust: was he a worldbuilder and fantasist, as Nabokov says or, as Doris Lessing claims, principally an anatomist of French social structures, a second Zola? Franz Kafka is unafraid of turning his character into a bug in a story's first sentence. Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway offers the reader a mad (Septimus) and a sane (Mrs Dalloway herself) version of stream of consciousness: how different are they? Cezanne, for example The Fisherman (Fantastic Scene) The Pointillism of painters like Georges Seurat Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Sheila Heti is a writer from Toronto who has published 11 books since the early 2000s. Those include Motherhood, Pure Colour, and How Should A Person Be? That latter title was a breakout work mixing memoir with fiction and self-help in a quest to examine her own authenticity. Her latest book is Alphabetical Diaries – a slim, elegant volume that compresses 10 years of Heti's own diary entries into 60,000 words across 25 chapters. Every entry, as the title suggests, is organised alphabetically. Joining her to discuss the book for this episode is Susie Mesure, who is a writer and reviewer whose work is often seen in The Sunday Times, The ipaper, Prospect, The Financial Times and more. If you'd like to become a Member and get access to all of our longer form interviews and Members-only content, just visit intelligencesquared.com/membership to find out more. For £4.99 per month you'll also receive: - Full-length and ad-free Intelligence Squared episodes, wherever you get your podcasts - Bonus Intelligence Squared podcasts, curated feeds and members exclusive series - 15% discount on livestreams and in-person tickets for all Intelligence Squared events - Our member-only newsletter The Monthly Read, sent straight to your inbox ... Or Subscribe on Apple for £4.99: - Full-length and ad-free Intelligence Squared podcasts - Bonus Intelligence Squared podcasts, curated feeds and members exclusive series ... Already a subscriber? Thank you for supporting our mission to foster honest debate and compelling conversations! Visit intelligencesquared.com to explore all your benefits including ad-free podcasts, exclusive bonus content and early access. ... Subscribe to our newsletter here to hear about our latest events, discounts and much more. https://www.intelligencesquared.com/newsletter-signup/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sheila Heti in conversation with Juliet Jacques: Sheila Heti, author of Alphabetical Diaries, Pure Colour, Motherhood and How Should A Person Be?, among other works, speaks to writer, journalist, filmmaker Juliet Jacques, whose published works include Monaco, Variations and Trans: A Memoir, about her writing to date. The discussion touches on revealing the hidden face of the self in writing, taking contemporary culture seriously as subject matter, the possibility of capturing ‘the spirit of the age' in a time of fragmentation, and the unconscious processes that shape our lives. Recorded at Young Space in May 2024. Edited by Frankie Wells. Music composed by Kwes Darko.

Last week we were joined by the wonderful Sheila Heti to celebrate the launch of her Alphabetical Diaries. In taking a decade of her journals, sorting the sentences alphabetically, then paring them down to about a tenth of their original length, Sheila Heti has freed a slice of her life from the shackles of time and in doing so has extracted some other, deeper kind of meaning from it. Alphabetical Diaries is a work that provokes vertiginous reflections on the construction of the self; that reveals how our psychological ticks and day-to-day fixations weigh heavily on our lives; that leads us to reconsider how we see, treat, judge and misjudge our friends and lovers; and that even makes us question how the book as an object works. In conversation with Adam Biles.Buy Alphabetical Diaries: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/alphabetical-diaries-2*Sheila Heti is the author of eleven books, including the novels Pure Colour, Motherhood, and How Should a Person Be?, which New York magazine deemed one of the New Classics of the twenty-first century. Her books have been translated into twenty-four languages. She lives in Toronto, Canada. Alphabetical Diaries is her first book with Fitzcarraldo Editions. Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-englandListen to Alex Freiman's latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Fiona Warnick, author of the charming novel The Skunks, drops by to talk animals and metaphor, how her creative writing program helped her with this book, writing smooth, and more than that, because we also get into Sheila Heti's Alphabetical Diaries, which inspires a deeper dive into the work of Heti and her influence.contribute! https://patreon.com/smdbfor drink recipes, book lists, and more, visit: somanydamnbooks.commusic: Disaster Magic(https://soundcloud.com/disaster-magic) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How does the past live on within our experience of the present? And how does our decision to speak about or write down our recollections of how things were change our understanding of those memories--how does it change us in the present? Asking those questions back in 2019 brought RTB into the company of memory-obsessed writers like Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust. Discussing autofiction by Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti and Karl Ove Knausgaard, John and Elizabeth begin to understand that the line between real-life fact, memory, and fiction is not quite as sharp as we had thought. Joining Recall This Book for this conversation is philosopher Helena De Bres, author of influential articles including “The Many, not the Few: Pluralism about Global Distributive Justice”, “Justice in Transnational Governance”, “What's Special About the State?” “Local Food: The Moral Case” and most recently "Narrative and Meaning in Life". (Her website contains links to her many fine articles for fellow philosophers and for the general public). She has recently begun to work on moral philosophy, especially the question of what makes a life meaningful, and on philosophy of art. John ranks his favorite anthropologists, while Elizabeth wonders whether autofiction necessarily takes on the affect of an academic department meeting--and what that affect has to do with Kazuo Ishiguro. Discussed in this episode: "A Sketch of the Past," Virginia Woolf "Finding Innocence and Experience: Voices in Memoir," Sue William Silverman The Outline Trilogy, Rachel Cusk My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgaard How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life, Sheila Heti An Artist of the Floating World, Kazuo Ishiguro The Moth The Day of Shelly's Death: The Poetry and Ethnography of Grief, Renato Rosaldo Memoir: An Introduction, G. Thomas Couser The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell Or Orwell: Writing and Democratic Socialism, Alex Woloch Listen and Read Here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

How does the past live on within our experience of the present? And how does our decision to speak about or write down our recollections of how things were change our understanding of those memories--how does it change us in the present? Asking those questions back in 2019 brought RTB into the company of memory-obsessed writers like Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust. Discussing autofiction by Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti and Karl Ove Knausgaard, John and Elizabeth begin to understand that the line between real-life fact, memory, and fiction is not quite as sharp as we had thought. Joining Recall This Book for this conversation is philosopher Helena De Bres, author of influential articles including “The Many, not the Few: Pluralism about Global Distributive Justice”, “Justice in Transnational Governance”, “What's Special About the State?” “Local Food: The Moral Case” and most recently "Narrative and Meaning in Life". (Her website contains links to her many fine articles for fellow philosophers and for the general public). She has recently begun to work on moral philosophy, especially the question of what makes a life meaningful, and on philosophy of art. John ranks his favorite anthropologists, while Elizabeth wonders whether autofiction necessarily takes on the affect of an academic department meeting--and what that affect has to do with Kazuo Ishiguro. Discussed in this episode: "A Sketch of the Past," Virginia Woolf "Finding Innocence and Experience: Voices in Memoir," Sue William Silverman The Outline Trilogy, Rachel Cusk My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgaard How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life, Sheila Heti An Artist of the Floating World, Kazuo Ishiguro The Moth The Day of Shelly's Death: The Poetry and Ethnography of Grief, Renato Rosaldo Memoir: An Introduction, G. Thomas Couser The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell Or Orwell: Writing and Democratic Socialism, Alex Woloch Listen and Read Here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How does the past live on within our experience of the present? And how does our decision to speak about or write down our recollections of how things were change our understanding of those memories--how does it change us in the present? Asking those questions back in 2019 brought RTB into the company of memory-obsessed writers like Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust. Discussing autofiction by Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti and Karl Ove Knausgaard, John and Elizabeth begin to understand that the line between real-life fact, memory, and fiction is not quite as sharp as we had thought. Joining Recall This Book for this conversation is philosopher Helena De Bres, author of influential articles including “The Many, not the Few: Pluralism about Global Distributive Justice”, “Justice in Transnational Governance”, “What's Special About the State?” “Local Food: The Moral Case” and most recently "Narrative and Meaning in Life". (Her website contains links to her many fine articles for fellow philosophers and for the general public). She has recently begun to work on moral philosophy, especially the question of what makes a life meaningful, and on philosophy of art. John ranks his favorite anthropologists, while Elizabeth wonders whether autofiction necessarily takes on the affect of an academic department meeting--and what that affect has to do with Kazuo Ishiguro. Discussed in this episode: "A Sketch of the Past," Virginia Woolf "Finding Innocence and Experience: Voices in Memoir," Sue William Silverman The Outline Trilogy, Rachel Cusk My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgaard How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life, Sheila Heti An Artist of the Floating World, Kazuo Ishiguro The Moth The Day of Shelly's Death: The Poetry and Ethnography of Grief, Renato Rosaldo Memoir: An Introduction, G. Thomas Couser The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell Or Orwell: Writing and Democratic Socialism, Alex Woloch Listen and Read Here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Kiran Dass reviews Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti published by Fitzcarraldo Editions

V recenzní části se mimo jiné podíváme na to, jak kanadská spisovatelka Sheila Heti promýšlí otázky mateřství ve své knižní filozofující eseji s názvem Mateřství. A na řadu přijde i pravidelná soutěž. Moderuje Karolína Koubová.

Sheila Heti, the award-winning author of PURE COLOUR, joins Zibby to chat about her new book, ALPHABETICAL DIARIES, a passionate, reflective, and joyful collection of thoughts she gathered over a ten-year period, and then arranged from A to Z. Sheila describes her creative process, explaining how she explored patterns and repetitions while alphabetizing her diary entries. She and Zibby also delve into the essence of the self, the surprising continuity of personal identity over time, the challenges of editing such an unconventional project, and the allure of reading someone else's diary. Finally, Sheila shares her best advice for aspiring authors.Purchase on Bookshop: https://bit.ly/3v00A9qShare, rate, & review the podcast, and follow Zibby on Instagram @zibbyowens! Now there's more! Subscribe to Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books on Acast+ and get ad-free episodes. https://plus.acast.com/s/moms-dont-have-time-to-read-books. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sheila Heti on her new experimental book, Alphabetical Diaries.

In this episode we're discussing the new novel Fourteen Days. The book is a collaboration by 36 authors including Margaret Atwood, John Grisham, Celeste Ng, RL Stine, and Dave Eggers – and part of the experience is guessing who wrote which part. So does the premise work as a novel? What do we want from experimental fiction? And are we ready to revisit the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic, during which the action is set? Lilah is joined by the FT's acting deputy books editor Andrew Dickson and assistant arts editor Rebecca Watson, author of the novel Little Scratch.-------We love hearing from you. Lilah is on Instagram @lilahrap and we're on X @lifeandartpod. You can email us at lifeandart@ft.com. We are grateful for reviews, on Apple, Spotify, etc.-------Links (all FT links get you past the paywall): – Fourteen Days, edited by Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston, is out now where books are sold. – The FT's review of Fourteen Days is here: https://on.ft.com/4bCdRFD – Rebecca's novel is called Little Scratch (2021). Her second novel I Will Crash comes out on July 4th.– Andy recommends novels by Sheila Heti and Jon Fosse for their experimental prose. – Andy is on X, formerly Twitter, @andydickson. Rebecca is @rebeccawhatsun-------Special FT subscription offers for Life and Art podcast listeners, from 50% off a digital subscription to a $1/£1/€1 trial, are here: http://ft.com/lifeandartRead a transcript of this episode on FT.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this fantastic recent episode from our colleagues at Novel Dialogue, Sheila Heti sits down with Sunny Yudkoff and John to discuss her incredibly varied oeuvre. She does it all: stories, novels, alphabetized diary entries as well as a series of dialogues in the New Yorker with an AI named Alice. Drawing on her background in Jewish Studies, Sunny prompts Sheila to unpack the implicit and explicit theology of her recent Pure Colour (Sheila admits she “spent a lot of time thinking about …what God's pronouns are going to be” )–as well as the protagonist's temporary transformation into a leaf. The three also explore how life and lifelikeness shape How Should a Person Be. Sheila explains why “auto-fiction” strikes her as a “bad category” and “a lazy way of thinking about what the author is doing formally” since “the history of literature is authors melding their imagination with their lived experience.” if you enjoyed this Novel Dialogue crossover conversation, you might also check out earlier ones with Joshua Cohen, Charles Yu, Caryl Phillips, Jennifer Egan, Helen Garner and Orhan Pamuk. Mentioned in this Episode: By Sheila Heti: Pure Colour How Should a Person Be? Alphabetical Diaries Ticknor We Need a Horse (children's book) The Chairs are Where the People Go (with Misha Glouberman) Also mentioned: Oulipo Group Autofiction: e.g. Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk, Karl Ove Knausgard Craig Seligman, Sontag and Kael George Eliot, Middlemarch Clarice Lispector (e.g. The Hour of the Star) Kenneth Goldsmith Soliloquy Willa Cather , The Professor's House (overlap of reality and recollection): “When I look into the Æneid now, I can always see two pictures: the one on the page, and another behind that: blue and purple rocks and yellow-green piñons with flat tops, little clustered houses clinging together for protection, a rude tower rising in their midst, rising strong, with calmness and courage–behind it a dark grotto, in its depths a crystal spring.”) William Steig, Sylvester and The Magic Pebble. Listen and Read: Transcript: 6.6 Overtaken by Awe: Sheila Heti speaks with Sunny Yudkoff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In this fantastic recent episode from our colleagues at Novel Dialogue, Sheila Heti sits down with Sunny Yudkoff and John to discuss her incredibly varied oeuvre. She does it all: stories, novels, alphabetized diary entries as well as a series of dialogues in the New Yorker with an AI named Alice. Drawing on her background in Jewish Studies, Sunny prompts Sheila to unpack the implicit and explicit theology of her recent Pure Colour (Sheila admits she “spent a lot of time thinking about …what God's pronouns are going to be” )–as well as the protagonist's temporary transformation into a leaf. The three also explore how life and lifelikeness shape How Should a Person Be. Sheila explains why “auto-fiction” strikes her as a “bad category” and “a lazy way of thinking about what the author is doing formally” since “the history of literature is authors melding their imagination with their lived experience.” if you enjoyed this Novel Dialogue crossover conversation, you might also check out earlier ones with Joshua Cohen, Charles Yu, Caryl Phillips, Jennifer Egan, Helen Garner and Orhan Pamuk. Mentioned in this Episode: By Sheila Heti: Pure Colour How Should a Person Be? Alphabetical Diaries Ticknor We Need a Horse (children's book) The Chairs are Where the People Go (with Misha Glouberman) Also mentioned: Oulipo Group Autofiction: e.g. Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk, Karl Ove Knausgard Craig Seligman, Sontag and Kael George Eliot, Middlemarch Clarice Lispector (e.g. The Hour of the Star) Kenneth Goldsmith Soliloquy Willa Cather , The Professor's House (overlap of reality and recollection): “When I look into the Æneid now, I can always see two pictures: the one on the page, and another behind that: blue and purple rocks and yellow-green piñons with flat tops, little clustered houses clinging together for protection, a rude tower rising in their midst, rising strong, with calmness and courage–behind it a dark grotto, in its depths a crystal spring.”) William Steig, Sylvester and The Magic Pebble. Listen and Read: Transcript: 6.6 Overtaken by Awe: Sheila Heti speaks with Sunny Yudkoff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“A little more than 10 years ago, I began looking back at the diaries I had kept over the previous decade. I wondered if I'd changed. So I loaded all 500,000 words of my journals into Excel to order the sentences alphabetically.” That's how author Sheila Heti describes the origins of the decade-long project that would become her latest book, “Alphabetical Diaries.” When she reviewed those sentences sorted on a spreadsheet, Heti says she found a constant self — one preoccupied across time with the same worries about writing, money and love. We talk to her about what revisiting and reorganizing her diary entries revealed about her own consistencies and contradictions. And we'll hear from you: What have you learned from re-reading your diaries? Guests: Sheila Heti, author, “Alphabetical Diaries,” “Motherhood,” “Pure Colour” and “How Should A Person Be?”

The writer Sheila Heti is known for unusual approaches, but her latest work is decidedly experimental. Heti “is one of the most interesting novelists working today,” according to The New Yorker critic Parul Sehgal. “She is ruthlessly contemporary. By which I mean, she's not interested in writing a novel as a nostalgic exercise. She's constantly trying to figure out  new places fiction can go. New ways that we're using language, new ways that our minds are evolving.” To write her new book, “Alphabetical Diaries,” Heti combed through a decade's worth of her own diaries, then alphabetized the sentences; in the first chapter, every sentence in the narrative begins with the letter “A,” and so on. “It's fun to find writing that shouldn't be in a novel, and to figure out, can it do the same things that we want writing in novels to do,” she shares, “which is [to] move us, and tell us something new about the world and about ourselves.” In other words, she's not interested in experimentalism for its own sake. “I always want to write a straight realist novel,” she says. “Something proper, like the books that I love most. . . . It doesn't happen, because I think I don't notice the same things that those writers I love notice. I'm impatient with certain things that they were patient with.” 

“I'm interested in the limitations of the mind — like that your brain really does only go down so many paths, and then there's a million paths that for some reason, it never goes down…”  Sheila Heti's Alphabetical Diaries is a memoir in a form all its own. Told in order, sentence by sentence from A to Z, to tell a story of identity and change in a lyrically constructed way. Heti joins us to talk about the inception and writing of this book, intense and purposeful editing, creative process and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over.  This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Executive Producer Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.                    New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.          Featured Books (Episode):  Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti Pure Colour by Sheila Heti How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti Ticknor by Sheila Heti 

Watch/Listen to Reading the Room on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/thebarandthebookcaseEmail: thebarandthebookcase@gmail.comJaylen's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thebarandthebookcase/Reading the Room Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/readingtheroom.podcast/Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/64819771-jaylenTikTok: tiktok.com/@thebarandthebookcase

On this week's episode, I have author Shelia Heti, book writer of Pure Color, Motherhood, Alphabetical Diaries, and many many more. We talk about how I discovered her writing and why Pure Color meant so much to me. She also explains her writing process and how she approaches a story. There is so much more.Show NotesSheila Heti Website: https://www.sheilaheti.com/Sheila Heti on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheila_HetiMichael's Online Screenwriting Course - https://michaeljamin.com/courseFree Screenwriting Lesson - https://michaeljamin.com/freeJoin My Newsletter - https://michaeljamin.com/newsletterAutogenerated TranscriptSheila Heti:That's what I was thinking.Michael Jamin:It was work harder.Sheila Heti:I was like, I got to work harder than any other writer alive.Michael Jamin:And what did that work look like to you?Sheila Heti:Just always writing and always not being satisfied and being a real critic of my work and trying to make it better and trying to be more, try to get it to sound and more interesting and figure out what my sentences were and letting myself be bad and repeat myself until I got better. And I don't think that I ever let that go. I'm not sitting here today saying, I work harder than any other writer alive. I do remember having that feeling when I was young. That's what I need to do. That's the only wayMichael Jamin:You're listening to What the hell is Michael Jamin talking about? I'll tell you what I'm talking about. I'm talking about creativity. I'm talking about writing, and I'm talking about reinventing yourself through the arts.Michael Jamin:What the hell is Michael Jamin talking about today? Well, ladies and gentlemen, I'm talking about, honestly, one of the greatest, I feel, one of the greatest writers of my generation. Yep, yep. Her name is Sheila Hedy. She's the author of I guess 11 books, including Pure Color, although it's spelled with a U, the Canadian Way, a Garden of Creatures, motherhood, how Should a Person Be? And her forthcoming book, alphabetical Diaries. And she's just an amazing talent. So she's an author, but I don't describe her this way. And by the way, I'm going to talk about Sheila for about 59 minutes, and then at the end I'll let her get a word and then I'll probably cut her off. But I have to give her a good proper introduction. She's really, really that amazing of a writer. So author isn't really the right word. She really is, in my opinion, an artist who paints with words.And if you imagine going up to a Van Gogh painting, standing right up next to it, and then you see all these brushstrokes, and then you take a step back and you're like, okay, now I see the patterns of the brushstrokes. And you take a little step back, oh, the patterns form an image. Then another step back, you say, oh, that's a landscape. It really is like that with her writing. She has these images that she paints with words, and then they form bigger thoughts and you pull back and it's really amazing what she does and how she kind of reinvents herself with each piece. And so I'm so excited and honored she for you to join me here so I can really talk more about this with you. Thank you for coming.Sheila Heti:Yeah, thanks. That introduction made me so happy. Thank you for saying all that.Michael Jamin:Lemme tell you by the way, how I first discovered you. So I have a daughter, Lola, she's 20, she's a writer, and we trade. I write something we trade. It's really lovely that we get to talk about. And so she's off at school, but she left a book behind and I'm like, all right, what's this book she left behind? Because that way I can read it and we can talk about that, have our book club. And she left Pure Color. And I was like, oh, I like the cover, so I'll take a look at it. And what I didn't realize, it was the perfect book to discover you by because it's book about among other things, about a father's relationship with his daughter. So I text her, I say, I'm reading pure color. She goes, Sheila Hedy's, one of my favorite authors. If I could write anybody, it would be her. I'm like, all right, well, I got to continue reading this. And then a couple of days later, I get to the part and I send her a text. I say, you and me would make a great leaf. And she goes, that's my favorite part. The tree. That's my favorite part.You're also an interviewer. You've interviewed some amazing writers. Joan Didion, Margaret Atwood, big shots. And so I'm sure as an interviewer, you give a lot of thought to your first question. So I was trying to, I better give a lot of thought to my first question, and I kept coming back to the same one, which is pure color. It's such a big swing. If you were to pitch me this idea, you'd say, I'm going to write a book. It's about a father's relationship with his daughter, but it's also about a woman's unrequited love with her friend, but it's also about the soul and what it means to have a life. I'd say, I don't know, Sheila, that's kind of a big swing. I don't know about this, but you hit it out of the park, you did it. It was beautifully done. And so my first question is, you come up with an idea like this, where do you get the nerve to think that you can actually pull this off? This is really where do you get the nerve to think that, okay, I'm going to do this.Sheila Heti:The nerve.Michael Jamin:Well, it's such a big swing. It's like, how do you know you can do this? Do you know what I'm saying?Sheila Heti:Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I don't know that I could do it. So it's nice to hear. I mean, I don't think that you ever think you're going to be able to finish the book that you start, and then when you finish a book, you never think you're ever going to start a new one. That's sort of where I am right now. In that confused place. There's a part of it that always feels like, I dunno how to explain it. I mean, I don't know how to answer that question. It's a weird process. There's no process. There's no system to doing it, and then you hope you did it. You feel good and it feels done, but you dunno how you ever got there.Michael Jamin:And how do you know you arrived? How do you know when it's time to quit on something? And do you ever quit on something?Sheila Heti:Yeah. Yeah, A lot. A lot. But usually not like three or four years in, usually 60 pages in or something like that.Michael Jamin:60Sheila Heti:Pages is when you start thinking this is not working.Michael Jamin:Is it a gut feeling? How do you knowSheila Heti:Your curiosity runs out?Michael Jamin:Your curiosity runs out. Okay, so you get bored by it yourself?Sheila Heti:Yeah.Michael Jamin:Is that what you're saying?Sheila Heti:Yeah, it's just like, that was fun. That was nice. That was a good couple of weeks. I was really excited. I really thought this was going somewhere. And then it just ends. It's like a relationship. You think, oh, this is so great, I'm going to be with this person. And then after six months you're like,Michael Jamin:I was kidding myself. But you're writing. I have so much I want to say, it seems like you reinvent yourself with each piece. You know what I'm saying? It's like pure color is very, very different from how should a person be, which I was like, okay, I want to read this. I'm not sure how should a person be, which is extremely different from alphabetical diaries, which is almost like an experiment. And I wonder, do you get pushback from your agent or your publisher? Do they want you to do the same thing? We know it works.Sheila Heti:No, I think that at this point there's no expectation of that. When I wrote my second book, there was a feeling like that's not the first one. And there was some disappointment and the publisher said, this book doesn't count as your next book. In part, I think it was so different, but I think at this point that's, I mean, I've been publishing for 20 years. That's not really what people say to me anymore.Michael Jamin:Really? What do they say? They say, oh good, this is fresh. And it's more from you.Sheila Heti:No, I mean, I guess I changed publishers a lot more than other people do. So my publisher of motherhood didn't like pure color, so they rejected it. So I found a different publisher and the publisher of Tickner, my second book didn't like how should a person be? So I found a different publisher. So I think I move around a lot for that reason.Michael Jamin:Is that common with authors? You have to tell me all about this author thing? No, it's not really common.Sheila Heti:No. Usually you have one publisher and one editor and you just stick with them for a long time. SoMichael Jamin:It seems though you came up through the art. Alright, I have this idea of who you are from reading your books. You have, it's all very personal what you write and which makes it brave. It's brave for a couple of reasons. It's brave because you're being so vulnerable, you're putting yourself out there, but it's also brave. I feel like you're trying something new each time and that could fail. And so that to me is part of what makes your writing so exciting. But do you have any expectation when you're writing something which is so different, do you have an expectation of your reader how you want them to react?Sheila Heti:I mean, I want them to get to the end of the book. That's what I want. I want to draw them through, but I don't think I have a feeling like, oh, I want them to be sad on this page and I want them to be curious of this page and feel this way on this page. I just want them to be interested enough to get to the end. So how do I keep that momentum up and how some people conversation, they have long monologues, they're like a monologue, but I'm not because I'm always afraid people are going to lose interest. So I kind of feel like the same with my book. I'm always afraid that somebody's going to lose interest. So I'm always trying to keep it moving,Michael Jamin:But it's not an emotional reaction. I mean, your writing is very philosophical to me. When I'm reading your work, I feel like maybe this is my theory about what you have, and I'm sure it's not right, but it's that there are passages which I feel are so rich and so smart, and I have so much thought that I have to go back and read it again. So I'm wondering if that's what you're thinking. I want to write something that makes people have to read it again.Sheila Heti:No, I never think that because a very fast reader, and I don't reread passages and I don't read slowly. So for me, I'm always thinking that people are reading. I'm always imagining the person reading kind of fast,Michael Jamin:But thought. I mean some of them are really, some of your thoughts are very deep and very profound, and I'm like, I'm not sure if I understood all this. I got to read it again. I mean, don't you think? No.Sheila Heti:Yeah, I guess so. I don't know. I don't really think about that. I don't really think about the person, the reader in that way of like, are they going to have to read this again? Is this going to be hard for them to understand? I think my language is very straightforward. Yeah. I don't know how I think about the reader. I think of myself as the reader. So I'm really writing it so that I like every sentence. I like the way it turns. I like the pictures it makes.Michael Jamin:But when you say I want them to get to the end, what are you hoping they'll do at the end? Is there any hope or expectation?Sheila Heti:Well, I think especially in pure color, the end is really important. It kind of makes the whole book makes sense. And motherhood too, and maybe less how should a person be and less alphabetical diaries. But I think in some cases, a book, I'm somebody who doesn't always read books to the end. I like getting taste of different author's minds and so on. But I think in the case of some books, you have to read it to the end to really understand the whole, so that's in the case of pure color, why I wanted people to get to the endMichael Jamin:BecauseSheila Heti:It makes the beginning mean something different. If you've read.Michael Jamin:It does. I mean it is, and it's about processing grief. So do you outline when you come up with an idea, where do you begin?Sheila Heti:Well, with pure color, I thought I want to write a book about the history of art criticism. So I always start off really far away from where I end up. I always think that I want to write a book of nonfiction and I'm not a good nonfiction writer, so it always ends up being a novel. But I think I usually start off with an, well, in the case of this book, I also started off with this title that I had in my dream. The title was Critics Bayer, BARE. So I was thinking about art criticism and so on, but then I don't know, the books kind of take on their own direction. I never really understood when people said that they had characters that sort of did things that they didn't expect. But I feel like that is true sometimes of the book as a whole. It moves in a direction I didn't expect, so I couldn't outline.Michael Jamin:You don't outline all. And so does it require you to discover what the story is then once you find it, toss out the stuff that's not the story orSheila Heti:Yeah, I basically write way too much and then just cut and try to find the story and move things in different orders and try to find the plot after. I've written a ton of stuff already,Michael Jamin:Because I know from reading, you come from the art world, you're an artist and I think you hang out with artists, people, so you talk about what art is, is that right or no, do not shatter what I think of now. That's not itSheila Heti:Mean and relationships and all that kind ofMichael Jamin:Stuff and relationships. Because I mean, I don't know, it seems like that's why I say you're an artist. You have these conversations even about what art is. And do you draw inspiration from paintings when you approach?Sheila Heti:Yeah, I'm interested in the book as art. I think more than storytelling. I'm interested in the book as sort of an experience that you're undergoing in different way from just the experience of being told a story. I don't think that I'm so interested probably in the things that a lot of other novelists are interested in, character and plot and conflict and all those things.Michael Jamin:Well, it's really, I've heard you say this, it's really, you're writing various forms of you and it's very personal and very intimate. But you also made the distinction in something I read where there's Sheila, the author, then there's Sheila, the character. Is that right?Sheila Heti:Yeah. I mean, in two of the books there's kind of a character that sort of stands in a way for me, but it never really, it doesn't feel like a direct transcription of myself or my life or my thoughts. There's always this feeling of maybe it's like how actors are, there's a part of yourself that goes into the character and there's other parts of yourself that are left out.Michael Jamin:And so I was going to say, is there stuff about you that you leave out, for example? I mean, how should a person be? Or alphabetical diaries, it feels like we're talking about you, right?Sheila Heti:Yeah. Well, how should a person be felt? A lot like a character pretty, I was thinking about Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan. This was like 2005, and Britney Spears and these kind of women in culture that were bad girls and doing things sort of the subject of so much attention and so narcissistic or considered Narcissistic and the Hills, which was a show that I really loved. And sort of thinking about this character in the book being a voice that was somewhere between me and those girls. So there was this, this layering on of personalities, which I'm not thinking about. What does it mean to try to be a celebrity? What does it mean to be one? To be looked at, to idolize oneself? Those are my diaries. So there wasn't a sense of a character in the same way, but because the sentences are separated from one another, I guess it's like I don't feel like I'm telling anybody anything about my life. There's no anecdote in there.Michael Jamin:But I see that's the thing. And we'll just talk about alphabetical diaries because you're telling with such an, let me tell people what it's, so it's basically an ordinary diary is chronological. This is what I did today and this is tomorrow, whatever. But you grouped your diary by the first letter of each sentence, which organized, and this is again, another high degree of difficulty. This could have easily been gimmicky, but it was a rethinking of what a diary is. And when I say patterns emerge, so for example, when you get to D, these was do not whatever or do this or that. So you hear, okay, so here's a person creating rules for themselves. And then an E was even though, so now they're creating rules, but creating exceptions for these rules, making allowances. And so what you have is, and was so interesting about it, many of these thoughts were contradictory.So you're painting a picture of this person, but in one sentence, okay, maybe she's dating this guy. And the next sentence, this other guy, I'm like, well, what's going on here? Then I realize, oh, this is not chronological. And so I'm getting a complete picture of this person, which is so interesting, but, so I know who I guess know who you are, but I don't know who you are today. I know who you are as this arching thing in your life, which is so fricking interesting. And that was where the thought process going into this,Sheila Heti:Yeah, mean. So it's like 10 years of diaries and I put it into Excel and the a z function. So it's completely alphabetical first letter of the sentence and then the second letter and the third letter. And it was just, I mean, I guess I wanted to see exactly that. What happens if you look at yourself in that way? Do you see patterns? Do you understand yourself in a different way? Not narratively, but as a collection of themes or Yeah, exactly. That a scientific or sort of a cross section of yourself.Michael Jamin:Yeah,Sheila Heti:And it worked that way. I think with the diaries, what you do see is, oh, there are sort of these recurring thoughts and these recurring themes and these recurring ways of perceiving the world and perceiving yourself that persists over 10 years. That actually the one self, you think of yourself as this thing that's constantly changing through time and especially a diary gives you that feeling, but then when you do it alphabetical, the self looks like a really static kind of thing in way, no, I'm actually just these few little bubbles of concerns that don't change,Michael Jamin:That keep recurring when, by the way, when people say everything's been done before everything's been written, it's like, well, you haven't read Sheila Heady. Start reading hers. This is different. This why's so interesting about, that's why I think you're such an amazing writer, and it totally worked. Totally. You get a picture of this person and the recurring themes and recurring worries and, and even one of them, some things that struck me, there was one passage where it's like you go into a bookstore and you're like, isn't this also novels? Isn't it also unimportant? And I'm like, no, if it was, you wouldn't be doing this. So this was just a thought that you had at one point. It's not how you feel. It's how you felt at this one moment, right?Sheila Heti:Yeah, yeah. Literary fiction. Yeah. Like what a little tiny thing that is.Michael Jamin:But when people, okay, so now we have this picture of you and when you go do, let's say book signings or whatever, and people come up to you, they must have a parasocial relationship with you where they feel they know you. Your writing is so intimate. And what's your response to that?Sheila Heti:I think that's nice. I mean, I think that that's kind of the feeling you want people to have is it is your soul or your mind or whatever that you're trying to give people. And so if somebody feels that they know you well, in a certain sense they do. I mean, obviously not that well, they knowMichael Jamin:What you share, but there's, okay, I don't know what kind of music you like. I've read to all this stuff, but I know your insecurities and fears, but I don't know what you think is funny. I don't know what music you like. There's stuff you held back.Sheila Heti:Yeah, absolutely. But I think that's like, I don't know. I mean, I don't know. People aren't really very weird with me. Ed books or things, people are just pretty nice. And I never get this. I, I've rarely had interactions that feel creepy or weird or presumptuous or any of those things.Michael Jamin:Well, I'm not even going even that far, but they feel like they must feel like they know you certainly, but they know what you share. They know as much as you share. Right?Sheila Heti:TheseMichael Jamin:Kind of brave, bold decisions you make to create all this stuff. Is there a writer whose work you emulated in the beginning? Where do you begin to come up with this stuff? Was there someone who you wanted to write? Just like,Sheila Heti:I mean, I really loved Dostoevsky and Kafka and the heavy hitters. Yeah, I mean, I just loved all the greatest writers,Michael Jamin:But did you want to write like them?Sheila Heti:No, I mean, I think the closest I ever felt like I wanted to write a writer was, do you know Jane Bowles? BOW Elliot? She was married to Paul Bulls.Michael Jamin:No, to me, much of your work felt a little bit like it. Tall Cals, some of it works. Some of it was very ethereal and meditative.Sheila Heti:Yeah, I mean, I think Jane Bowles was the only one that I really felt myself imitating her sentences. She wrote a book called Two Serious Ladies, which I still really love. That was the only time when I felt like I was falling into somebody else's cadences and rhythms and so on. AndMichael Jamin:What happened whenSheila Heti:That was with my first book, the Middle Stories, and then the second book was written was so different. The second book I wrote was in such a different style that left me, but maybe there's still a way in which I still do. I think she's probably the writer that I write the most, if anyone. But I mean, she only wrote one book. So it's a very different kind of life than the one that I've had. No, I'm just always just trying to keep myself interested. So I think that I don't ever want to, I a very, I just want it to be fun for me. And so if I was to write the same book again, it wouldn't be fun. And books take five years to Write, or this diary book took more than 10 years to edit. So by the time I'm done a book, no, I'm such a different person than I was in some way when I started, even though I just said that you don't really change, but there's a way in which you get tired of thinking about the same things over,Michael Jamin:But then you think it would be hard to not constantly tinker with it. Isn't that part of the problem?Sheila Heti:I like constantly tinkering with it. That's fun.Michael Jamin:But then you have to let go. But how do you let go of it though?Sheila Heti:Well, at a certain point you start making it worse. You're like, oh, I think I'm starting to make it worse. You start to become self-conscious, and then you start to want to correct it, and then you start to want it to sort of be the person that you are today rather than the person you were five years ago. But you've got to honor the person that was five years ago that started the book. So you can't carry it on so far that you become, you've changed so much that now you're a critic of the book that's going to destroy the book.Michael Jamin:Yeah. See, that's so interesting. That's something I think about quite a bit. Yeah. How do I just let it go? And that someone else, it's funny when you talk about the language, because that's one thing that struck me about pure color. Your sentences are written in very, they're very, it's kind of brief, very, I dunno what the best way to describe it, but it's almost terse. And to be honest, if you had told, as I'm reading this, I could have thought this was said 150 years ago, and then occasionally you say you make a reference to something modern Google, and I'm like, oh, wait a minute, this takes space today. So that was a conscious, obviously decision that you made to kind of give it a timelessness.Sheila Heti:Yeah, I always kind of want that because I think that's my hope for a book is that it could be understood in a hundred years or 500 years, or you need Plato today, you want to write something that people could understand in a thousand years.Michael Jamin:But you know what I'm saying, the language, it almost felt, but your language is different though, in an alphabetical diary. Well, obviously since it's a diary, but man, so to me it's like you're not doing, like I said, you're not doing the same thing. I don't know, it could have been two different authors. That's what I'm saying. I guess it felt like two very different pieces and it was just wonderful. But when you say, so what then? Because like I said, you have these art friends, I have this whole life for you, you have these because you went to art, you studied art, and you hang out with a bunch of artists and you talk about art, and I want to know what these conversations are because we don't talk about art and TV writing. No one, we don't think we're doing art, but I feel like that's what you guys are doing. So do you talk about what the whole point of art is?Sheila Heti:I think I did when I was younger,Michael Jamin:Right? Then you grewSheila Heti:Out of it when I was in my twenties. And then you kind of figure that out for yourself in some way. Well, then you have your crises and whatever, and then you got to think about it and talk about it again. But no, I think these days what I talk about with my friends is just whatever the specific project is, whatever problems you're having with a specific thing, mostly complaining, the difficulty of not being able to pull it off or feeling like you are stuck or you're never going to be able to write it. I have these three other writers that I share my work with we're meeting tomorrow. So before I got on the call with you, I just sent something off to them, and tomorrow we're just going to have read each other's things and talk about how we feel about it. But for me, I'm just like, I think what I need at this point from them is reassurance, honestly.Michael Jamin:Reassurance,Sheila Heti:Yeah. Because you're so lost in the middle and you don't know what you're communicating and if you're communicating anything, and is it worth continuing? Should it just all be thrown out? There's so much doubtMichael Jamin:Because it's so very humble of you. You're a master writer, and yet you make it sound like you're still a student. You know what I'm saying?Sheila Heti:I mean, you think, I don't know if it's the same for you, but don't you think you're always kind of a student? BecauseMichael Jamin:Whenever you start, yeah, yeah. Look, yes. When every time you're looking at that blank page, I dunno how to do any of this.Sheila Heti:Yeah, exactly. You always feel like you're back at square one somehow.Michael Jamin:Yeah.Sheila Heti:Although now, not exactly square one. I've been starting this new book this week, and again, it may get to 60 pages and fall away from me, but now I have a different feeling that I had when I was in my early twenties. The feeling I have now is like, oh, I did that. Oh, I've had that thought before. Oh, I've written senses in that way before. What I'm trying to do now is none of the things that I've already done. They just, and so, yeah, where is this part of myself that I haven't written from yet? So that's kind where I'm now. So it's not really starting from square one, but it's still just as hard,Michael Jamin:Right? Because you feel like you've said everything you had to say or done everything you wanted. Is that what it is? Or,Sheila Heti:I know what my sentences sound like, so I feel like, oh, I'm not surprised by that sentence. That sounds like a sentence that my, I feel like I'm, you get this rhythm that is very pleasurable to write if the sentences have a rhythm, but now I'm just like, I'm tired of that rhythm. That rhythm can only give me one kind of sentence or one kind of thought. So I'm trying to figure out what else is there inside.Michael Jamin:Yeah, I imagine that's hard for someone. Basically, you're a physician who's made a hit and another hit, and what if I don't do it again? How do I do it differently? Or how do I reinvent myself now?Sheila Heti:And even just what's the meaning in this for me now? With every book, there's a different phase of life you're at. And I'm 46 now, so I dunno how old you are.Michael Jamin:How dare you? I'm 53.Sheila Heti:Yeah, I figured you were just a few years older than me. So it's a very different age to write from because you are not hungry in the same way you were when you were 23 and you were both in houses. You have accomplished certain things. And so what's the deepest part of yourself that still needs to do this when you're 23? Every part of yourself needs to do it in this extreme way. You've got to make a life for yourself. You've got to prove to yourself, you can do it. You've got to make money, you've got to all this kind of stuff. So what's the place at 46 or 53 that you're writing from that is just as vital and urgent as that place at 23?Michael Jamin:Yeah, I think actually that's why I started changing mediums. I've kind of done this headcount thing. What else can I do?Sheila Heti:So the essay, the podcast? Yeah.Michael Jamin:Well, most of the essays, the essay started the whole thing. It was like, it's funny, in your book or a couple of times, you mentioned, should I go to LA? And I'm thinking, why does she want to go to la? What was that about? What'sSheila Heti:That about? I've got family there. When I was a little kid, my parents used to put me on a plane. I was five years old and I'd be sent to LA and I had relatives and I would stay with them. And it was just, to me, it's such happy childhood memories and I just love Los Angeles. Whenever I go back, I think this is a place in the world besides Toronto that I'd most like to live.Michael Jamin:Really? So different.Sheila Heti:Yeah. I just love it. Yeah, so I love everything. I love it.Michael Jamin:Oh my God, I don't what, I've been to Toronto. I had, well, then ISheila Heti:Remember that LA's in America, and then I like, no, maybe not.Michael Jamin:Yeah, good point. Good point. So there's something else. I remember what I wanted, what I want to say. You had in one book, it was like, you're lamenting. I hope I never have to teach. And now you're teaching, right?Sheila Heti:Yeah, just for this one year.Michael Jamin:Okay. What was that about that decision?Sheila Heti:Well, I love teaching and I wanted the money because I didn't want to have to feel like I had to rush to start a new book. So I just wanted a year where I didn't have to have that anxiety of what's my next book going to be like, I've got to start. I've got to get a certain ways in and then sell it. And I like teaching a lot, and I just felt excited about the idea, but it was supposed to be a two year position, and now I've just changed it to a one year position. It becomes too much, even one day. And teaching a week is like, there's no point to writeMichael Jamin:Because you have to read all the whatever they write on the side. You're saying, well,Sheila Heti:I've got to commute two hours to get there, and then two hours home, and then, I don't know. And then your brain just sort of stays in that university space with your students for three or four days, and then you have two days where you're not with them and then you go back to school.Michael Jamin:So what does your life really look like? Your writing life? What is it like to be an author on a dayday basis?Sheila Heti:What your life is all day long? You're either writing emails or you're writing writing. Probably spend more time writing emails and doing correspondence and businessy stuff than writing. Writing, and then all the life stuff, walking the dog, doing household chores. I don't have a very regimented existence, but I just sitting in bed and being on my computer, that's sort of myMichael Jamin:Favorite. That's where you write on laptop. Oh my God, my back would kill me. But something else you said, because I really was turning to you for answers as I was reading it. I'm like, she's got the answers. And you said, and you're like, I don't have the answers, but no, I'm like, no, she's got the answers. And you said, art must have at one point, art must have humor. I think you said that in How should a person be? And I was like, really? That's what you guys think. There has to be humor in art.Sheila Heti:Oh yeah. You got to know where the funny is. Yeah, I think,Michael Jamin:Sure. I don'tSheila Heti:Understand. It's the two. I read your essay. It was very funny.Michael Jamin:Yeah. But thank you. But I have an intention. I have an intention when I write, but I don't understand why you think there has to be humor. Alright. Why do you think there has to be humor it in art?Sheila Heti:Humor's such a part of life. I mean, if you don't have humor in life or art, you're missing a huge part of the picture. I mean, it's all, it's just the absurdity of being a human. It's,Michael Jamin:Well, see the thing as a sitcom writer, look, I'm grateful to have made a living as a sitcom writer. It's what I wanted to do, but it's not like anyone looks at what we do. It's like, oh, that's high art. They go, it's kind of mostly, people think it's kind of base. And I think, and when you think about even at the Oscars, when they're fitting the best picture, it's never a comedy. It's that the comedies are not important enough. And so that's why I had this feeling like, well, can humor be an art? Can it be, ISheila Heti:Mean, I think great art always has humor in it, but it's the same thing in literature. The funny writers are not as respected as the serious ones, but I think that they're wrong. I mean, Kurt Vonnegut, I love Kurt Vonnegut. He's extremely funny, but he's never had the same status as somebody like, I dunno, Don DeLillo or whatever, because he's not serious enough. But I think it's a very, who are the people that are making that judgment? That the solemn writers that have no humor are the best writers. They're just idiots. I mean, it's not the case.Michael Jamin:I gave my manuscript to one publisher. I was rejected from him, and he wrote, he was very kind. He goes, oh, this book really works. I like it, but it's not high literature. And we do high literature here. And I was like, how dare you? I was like, well, I totally agree. It's not high literature. Not that I could write high literature, but I didn't set out to do. But there was still that sting of what you're doing is not important because it's funny.Sheila Heti:Yeah. That's a stupid editor.Michael Jamin:Well, he got the last laugh. Wait a minute, wait a minute. But yeah, I don't know. Okay. But is humor in painting and humor in all art? I mean,Sheila Heti:Yeah, levity. Well, just that scent, that aspect of life. That is the laugh that is that bubbling up laughing. Yeah. I mean, I think that that's joy. Joy and humor are very closely connected. And a work of art without humor is a work of art without joyMichael Jamin:AndSheila Heti:Wants to take that in.Michael Jamin:Then what is art? I'm honest here. You learned this when you're 20 and I haven't learned it yet. So what is art to you and what's the difference between good art and bad art?Sheila Heti:It's a reflection of the human experience. It's like an expression of what it feels like to be a human, that a human is making for another human.Michael Jamin:Okay, so it's this interpretation of what you feel, what it means to be human, is that right?Sheila Heti:It's an expression of what you feel like it means to be human.Michael Jamin:Right. Okay. And then how do youSheila Heti:That in an object?Michael Jamin:And then how do you know if it's good art or bad art?Sheila Heti:I mean, there's no consensus, right? You liked pure color, but a lot of people don't. There's just no consensus because it touched you, but somebody else thinks it's the worst book they've ever read, and that's okay. I mean, I think that that's right. We can't all speak to each other. We're not all here for all of each other.Michael Jamin:Oh, just because you mentioned that it was so touching this one moment, it really hit me where you explain how you felt the father, how his love for his daughter was so much that it put pressure on her not to have her life because her life was so important to him. And I thought, oh crap, I hope I'm not doing that because my feeling is no, it's just pure love. It's an expression of pure love. But from the other side, I can see that.Sheila Heti:Yeah. Yeah. I think that that's what I was thinking about in that book. That's the sort of tragedy ofMichael Jamin:Yes,Sheila Heti:Families and friendships and so on, that we want to love each other, but we can't in the way that we want to.Michael Jamin:Hey, it's Michael Jamin. If you like my content, and I know you do because you're listening to me, I will email it to you for free. Just join my watch list. Every Friday I send out my top three videos of the week. These are for writers, actors, creative types, people like you can unsubscribe whenever you want. I'm not going to spam you, and the price is free. You got no excuse to join. Go to michaeljamin.com. And now back to, what the hell is Michael Jamin talking about?Michael Jamin:It was just so beautiful to express that as two souls stuck in a leaf, where is this coming from? It felt completely appropriate, but also almost out of the blue. And that's what was so amazing about that whole section. Thanks.Sheila Heti:Yeah. I don't even remember where that idea came to me. I don't know if you feel like this with your writing, but sometimes you remember exactly where an idea came from. You can even picture yourself being right there having it, and sometimes you almost have anesia around it,Michael Jamin:Really? And what about the part? There was so many lovely moments of this woman working in a lamp store, and she has to turn the lamps on every single lamp on, and it's almost like, I got to do this, but there's her counterpart who has to turn the lamps off at the end of the day, something equally horrible. It was really funny, and it was just, I don't know. Did you ever work in a lamp store?Sheila Heti:No. No. But there was this lamp store that I used to pass on the way to one of my first jobs, and I would look in the window, and I did eventually buy a lamp from that store with all the money I had in the world. But I never worked in a lamp store, but I was obsessed with this lamp. I really thought it was going to change my life.Michael Jamin:And do you still have it?Sheila Heti:No. It got broken in aMichael Jamin:Fit ofSheila Heti:Rage situation. Yeah, it got broken rage.Michael Jamin:I was stuck on a paragraph I wrote against this important list. ItSheila Heti:Was in the box on the floor, and somebody stepped on it. And anyway, it's sad, but whatever.Michael Jamin:Okay. But alright. So much of it felt like, yeah. Okay. So it was a version of you that wasn't exactly, but where was this coming from? You said you had a point you were making. I don't rememberSheila Heti:Where, because at some parts you remember where they came from and some parts you justMichael Jamin:Kind of pull out of, pullSheila Heti:Out of. You don't remember how they came about?Michael Jamin:Yeah. I don't know. I always feel like when I'm writing, if there's an idea that has a strong emotional reaction, like, okay, maybe there's something there.Sheila Heti:A strong emotional reaction in you.Michael Jamin:Yeah. In me. I have a terrible memory, but if I remember something, why do I remember it? There must be a reason.Sheila Heti:You have a terrible memory too,Michael Jamin:And you wouldn't know it, but I guess you document everything in your diary.Sheila Heti:I mean, the diary is usually not about things that happened. It's more about the feelings that I'm having in the moment that I'm writing it. I wish that my diary was more about things that happenedMichael Jamin:Really Well, you get to decide what you put in your diary.Sheila Heti:I know usually when one writes a diary, it's because you're in a moment of high emotion that you need to get your feelings out.Michael Jamin:Do you write every day in your diary?Sheila Heti:No. No, no. Just when I need to. And I don't even really do it anymore now.Michael Jamin:Interesting. Yeah, there is. There's something else you said about it. Yeah. There's so many moments that were so interesting. Like you said at one point that the men you date don't understand you. I'm like, well, don't they read your book? I mean, why don't you just give 'em your book and didn't understand you?Sheila Heti:No, I mean, I don't know.Michael Jamin:You don't know. We'll get back to, I don'tSheila Heti:Even think that it's really all Yeah, like you were saying earlier, it's not really you. It's just an expression of a corner of you.Michael Jamin:Yeah. I don't know. But do you really feel that? I mean, I'm going back and forth. You'll see I contradict myself, but what you write is so to me, it feels so personal. I don't know how it cannot be you.Sheila Heti:I mean, I don't know. When I'm working on it, it doesn't feel like me. It just feels like writing on a page. It feels very plastic. I don't feel like it's me.Michael Jamin:So there's no, wow, because there's no inhibition there because it's very intimate. There's no inhibition. You don't feel to be judged. This is just a character named Sheila, by the way.Sheila Heti:I mean, I just don't think about it. Just I have this, that part of my brain is not awake when I'm editing or writing that people that are going to think it's meMichael Jamin:Or whatever. Well, that's bold. That really is bold because the notion that you're not worried about being judged, you're not worrying about expressingSheila Heti:Yourself. I worry about being judged for an email that I send. That's a stupid email much more than I ever worry about a book.Michael Jamin:Really? Really? Yeah. Your book is permanent and it's your art.Sheila Heti:But I have so much control over it. I have so much. I take so much time with it. It's not spontaneous. It's really thought through. So I'm not, and it's art. It's not me. An email is me. A book is not, it's its own thing.Michael Jamin:Okay. How should a person be? I mean, this to me felt like this is your struggle. It was really interesting when it was a narrative struggle about a woman trying to find herself in a brief period of time. And I felt like, no, this is you. Right?Sheila Heti:I mean, it doesn't really feel like that. No.Michael Jamin:Alright. This interview's over. That's why I think when I said, you're brave, I think that's what makes you brave, is that this fearlessness of I can put it out there and I'm not really worried about it.Sheila Heti:Yeah. I just don't care. I care about being judged as a human in the world, as a person, but not through my books, not through your I care about it and Oh, she's wearing a really stupid outfit. I care about it in all those ways that everybody does, but not via the books. Not as the books as a portal to judgment about me.Michael Jamin:Wow. Wow. I I don't know if you know how profound that is. To me. It really is. Yeah, because it gives you so much freedom to write then.Sheila Heti:Yeah. I mean, but fiction is different from essays. I think with essays you do feel like it's you, but with novels you don't. Or I don't,Michael Jamin:Yeah. But I guess, and I didn't really know this term, it's auto nonfiction, which I guess is this term. I was not familiar withSheila Heti:Auto fiction. They call itMichael Jamin:Auto fiction. That's what I meant. Auto fiction. Yeah. And soSheila Heti:I like auto nonfiction though. I think that's how it should start to be called.Michael Jamin:Really? Yeah. Just by my dumbest. Yeah. But when you call it auto itself, so I don't know.Sheila Heti:Yeah, I didn't give it that term. The critics give it that term, auto fiction, but all writing is auto fiction. All writing comes from yourself. It's a really silly term, but I mean, they guess they use it for people that write characters that have their name. Which again, that's only, and how should a person be? Does the character have my name? None of the other books.Michael Jamin:Well, okay, but Well, theSheila Heti:Diaries, obviouslyMichael Jamin:The diaries, but also I also know that pure color was taken from your life. I mean, we know that inSheila Heti:A lot ofMichael Jamin:Ways. So I also want to know about this, and I know I'm concentrating on how should person, well, on both of 'em I guess. But this play that you were commissioned to write, how does that work that you were tortured by throughout the whole book? You felt like you couldn't come up with anything good. How does that come about? So a local theater said, will you write us a play?Sheila Heti:Yeah, yeah.Michael Jamin:And it was their idea.Sheila Heti:Yeah. Yeah. They commissioned a play for me,Michael Jamin:But they said, I mean, this is what we want it to be about. Or they said right aboutSheila Heti:It was a feminist theater company, and they said it could be about anything as long as it was about women in it. And I really had the hardest time. I mean, I wrote a play, I'm sure you experienced this in Hollywood, and then there was a lot of notes. And in theater we call it dramaturgy. And I got so confused and I just couldn't make the play better from the notes. And it was just this torture, because when you're writing a book, or at least in my case, editors aren't like that. They're not giving you their notes to make the book something other than what you want it to be. But in theater, what's this character's motivation? Why does this happen here? There was just so much feedback and I just lost my sense of what I liked about it and what it was.Michael Jamin:And then how did you find it ultimately? You were happy with it, weren't you?Sheila Heti:Ultimately, I just, when it got put on a couple years after, how should a person be was published, it was just my original draft. So I never ended up editing it according to any of the notes in the end.Michael Jamin:Wow. So you won that battle?Sheila Heti:I guess so you did. It wasn't them who put it on. It was some other, some kid.Michael Jamin:Oh,Sheila Heti:I mean, he's not a kid anymore, but he seemed like a kid at the time.Michael Jamin:But you also do something called trampoline hall, which struck me as really fun. It seems like you're just part of this artwork. You make art. Well, I don't care what it is. Let's just do something weird and interesting until trampoline hall, which I love the premise of it's you say people deliver lectures on subjects they don't know anything about.Sheila Heti:Is that what it's, it's not their area of professional expertise. So they can do, oh,Michael Jamin:So they are experts.Sheila Heti:They can do research for their talk. It's just that it can't be their professional expertise.Michael Jamin:So they're not talking out of the rests. They're talking to about if they know No. Oh, okay.Sheila Heti:They do the research. Yeah. And then there's, so the talk lasts about 15 minutes, and then there's a q and a, and then So there's three of those and night, and yeah, it's been running once a month in Toronto since December, 2000 or 2001. Them. I haven't been involved in it. You them? Oh, no, no. I mean, I started it, and my friend Misha Goberman is and was the host, but after about three or four years, I left around 2005 or so. But he still keeps it going. So now I used to pick the three people every month, and I just used to, when I was in my twenties, I had crushes on people all the time. And it was fascinated by people in such a way that it was a way of having these friendships where I would go out with them and talk about what their talk was going to be about, and then I'd see them on stage.And it was just a way of being with people. My life is not really like that anymore, where I'm coming into contact with so many people that I just have to have a show and put them on stage. I find 'em so fascinating. And the culture's changed because again, in the early two thousands, there weren't, the internet wasn't what it is. And I just felt like there's all these smart people with all these interesting things to say, and nobody's paying any attention to them. And here's a venue for them. You obviously don't need that, a barroom lecture series for people to have a voice in this culture anymore. Yeah,Michael Jamin:Right. That's right. Now you deal with students, young people. And so what's your take then, as an artist, as you deal with people of this younger generation? What do you see?Sheila Heti:I don't know. I mean, I only see them through a very narrow lens. You don't show your teacher that much of your life. I see them sitting in a classroom for two and a half hours once a week. I've only done it for seven weeks.Michael Jamin:But you read their work or you pretend to?Sheila Heti:I read it. There's not that much. I mean, I don't know. You can't really generalize about a generation. Every person's different.Michael Jamin:One of the stories in my book is about that. It was about me trying to, being in a creative writing class, trying to impress my teacher, and just having no idea how to write, just none. And feeling complete. You're smiling. You can relate or you see it.Sheila Heti:Well, because I'm smiling, because yeah, that's how people feel. And it's sort of a failure of the way that creative writing is taught that makes a person feel like they can't writeMichael Jamin:Well. Okay. So what's the first thing you tell? What's the most important thing you tell your students then maybe?Sheila Heti:Well, I try to show them all these examples of, so-called bad writing and stuff that's intentionally boring and that's badly put together because I just think it's a better route. You're more likely to become a good writer if you are trying to do something bad than if you're trying to do something good. If you're reading the greatest writers and you're trying to emulate them, and you're all intimidated and blocked and nervous, and you're trying to write in a style that has nothing to do with yourself.Michael Jamin:So then how does showing them something bad help? Do you say, go ahead and write or write. What's the point of showing them somethingSheila Heti:Bad? I don't want 'em to try to write. WellMichael Jamin:Write Well, you don't, but you don't want 'em to write schlocky or poorly written stuff either.Sheila Heti:I'd rather have them write basic. I don't know. I just think when you're trying to impress, when you're writing to try to impress somebody, it's just you're starting off on completely the wrong foot. I want them their writing. So for example, in this class, one of the first experiments we did was I told them to go into their messages, their text messages, threads, and to copy out every single text message that they'd sent and put that in a document and make it a long sort of monologue, because that is actually what they write. That is what they're writing. You got to start from what you're actually saying and what you're actually writing, not this imaginary idea of what writing is.Michael Jamin:Right, right, right. That's exactly right. So there's this thought of what writing should be and what writing, how get, I guess, how did you get over that, especially when you were writing your favorite authors were the greats. How did you find the confidence to have your own voice, I guess?Sheila Heti:Well, when I was young, when I was a teenager, I read all the Paris Review interviews, and I just got the sense like, oh, there's no way to do it no one way. Everyone has their own way. Faulkner has his way, and Dorothy Parker has her way, and John au has his way, and there's just no consensus. And so you just have to figure out your own way. That's what they all did. I just sort of saw that's what each one of them had done.Michael Jamin:See, that's where I struggled with, and you're getting my therapist now and my creative writing teacher when I was starting to write this book. Because as a TV writer, my job is not to have a voice. My job is to emulate the voice of the show or the characters. And I'm a copy. I'm a mimic. That's what I do. And that's what I've been doing for 27 years. And then to write, this was an experiment to me. What would it be like to write just whatever I want to write with no notes, no one telling me what to do. And it was very scary in the beginning. And it was very, I loved David Sari. How can I do him? And so I wrote a couple of pieces. I studied him, I read all, I've studied books over and over again. He was so entertaining. He writes so beautifully. And I read it over and over again, and I wrote my first pieces, almost like I was doing him. And I felt, oh, this is good. And then I let it sit for a couple of weeks, and then I read it with fresh eyes. And this is terrible. It sounds like someone pretending to be him is terrible.Sheila Heti:Yeah, yeah. But that's a stage that you still probably learned a bunch by doing that, maybe about structure or about something.Michael Jamin:No, not that I learned that I felt like I was a pretender, but my thought was, well, he's doing it. He's successful. I write and now I perform my pieces as well, which is what, and I tore a little bit, and I thought, well, if it works for him, why reinvent the wheels? He's obviously got a market. And then I realized I had to come to the conclusion that it was almost heartbreaking. I can never write like him. I can't, no matter much. I want to, it'll never happen. And then I had to let go of that, and then had to come to the more, even a larger, heartbreaking realization was like, oh, I have to write me. And who the hell is that?Sheila Heti:And how did you find it?Michael Jamin:It was a lot of just drafts after draft. And then the problem, and this is something else, but I find some of the earlier pieces are very different from the later pieces. And I've tempted to go back and change the earlier ones. But like you're saying, I'm also tempted. I feel like I can't, can't, it's time to let 'em go.Sheila Heti:Right. That was that person.Michael Jamin:But it's all in the same book, and it felt like, well, should there be any kind of, is that okay? Is it okay to feel like each one's a little different from the other? I don't know.Sheila Heti:Yeah. I don't know. I mean, are the early ones still good, even if they're different?Michael Jamin:Yeah, I think they're good. I'm not sure if anyone else would notice except for me, but I noticedSheila Heti:Maybe not. Yeah, probably. Yeah. And I think it's okay if they're a little different from each other.Michael Jamin:Yeah. I don't, well, we'll find out. But that was very difficult for me to figure out how to, and I turned a lot to, and I wonder if you do this, you kind of answered a little bit. I didn't want to turn to other writers. I turned to musicians to music. Do you do that asSheila Heti:Well? Which musicians?Michael Jamin:It was turning to musicians to find out what is art? What am I supposed to be doing here? Yeah.Sheila Heti:I always look to painters for that.Michael Jamin:So painter, is it contemporary painters orSheila Heti:Contemporary or not contemporary?Michael Jamin:And how do you pull, what are you looking for them? Yeah. When you look at a painting, how does that help you?Sheila Heti:Well, how does it help you to look at musicians?Michael Jamin:Well, there's two things with music, and I feel like music is too, they're telling us, they get to tell a story with lyrics and with music. So if you didn't hear the lyrics, maybe you'd still get the sentiment of it. And so I feel like they have two tools where we only have one because they can set a mood just for the tune. And so I looked to them for the intimacy in their bravery. You'd look, okay, Stevie Nicks, she's singing about herself. That's all she's doing. And okay, you can do that. It just felt so vulnerable to be doing this.Sheila Heti:Yeah.Michael Jamin:And that's why I'm shocked that you're so brave about it.Sheila Heti:I mean, it's the only job is to not care about yourself in relation to it, that the book matters. And you don't matter.Michael Jamin:Right. That's your job is to put the art first. Right.Sheila Heti:To not do things because worried about what people will think of you. That's the first. And I guess when I was younger, I was reading so many avant-garde writers that did that in such flamboyant ways. It just seemed to me the only Henry Miller, it just seemed to me maybe the first lesson, not even a conscious lesson, just like, oh, clearly he's not worried about what people are going to think of him or his reputation among decent people.Michael Jamin:Yeah. Right. And so you don't have that, obviously, you don't have that worry.Sheila Heti:No, but I don't know. A lot of decent people.Michael Jamin:Yes, you do. But yeah, I don't know. Again, it's what makes you, I don't know, such a fantastic writer. I mean, I want everyone to read your work because it's really fantastic. I have some questions here that I have to ask from. So my daughter, Lola, I tell her she's a way better writer than I was at her age. But the truth is, she may be a better writer than I'm now, but I don't tell her that part. But she has these questions. She put down some questions like, damn, you've got some good questions. So I can't take credit. I can't take credit for this question. GiveSheila Heti:Me Lowes questions.Michael Jamin:Okay. First of all, she says, what are your dreams for your writing, and how do you let them go while also keeping them alive? Oops. I dropped a rock.Sheila Heti:My dreams. You dropped a rock.Michael Jamin:Yeah, I dropped. I have magic crystals by my computer that are supposed to make my work better.Sheila Heti:Oh, what kind of rock is that?Michael Jamin:It came out of my head. You want some? Yeah. I don't know. They're magic, but they're on my computer. So what are your dreams for your writing, and how do you let them go while also keeping them alive? And I guess what she means is, I guess, ambitions at the age You were talking about that young age.Sheila Heti:Young. Yeah. How old is she? 20.Michael Jamin:Yeah.Sheila Heti:When I was 20, my dream was to be the best living writer, just to be the best novelist, just to work harder than any other writer alive. That's what I was thinking. ItMichael Jamin:Was work harder.Sheila Heti:I was like, I got to work harder than any other writer alive.Michael Jamin:That's what I was. And what did that work look like to you?Sheila Heti:Just always writing and always not being satisfied, and being a real critic of my work and trying to make it better, and trying to try to get it to sound more interesting and figure out what my sentences were, and letting myself be bad and repeat myself until I got better. And I don't think that I ever let that go. I am not sitting here today saying, I work harder than any other writer alive. But I do remember having that feeling when I was young. That's what I need to do. That's the only way it's going to work.Michael Jamin:Yeah. That importance. Yeah, becauseSheila Heti:It's just so hard. It's just so hard to write. Well, to write anything good for people.Michael Jamin:I think you give the perfect answer on that. I'll give her another theSheila Heti:Parental answer. In any case, work hard.Michael Jamin:Work hard. Well, but it was really,Sheila Heti:It's true. I think it's true that, and I remember being her age and interviewing this older Canadian writer, Barbara Gowdy, who I really loved, and she told me, and she's terrific. She told me, I was writing for the student newspaper, and she said, it's funny, I've got my students who have talent, clear talent, and then I've got these other students who don't seem to have so much talent, but the ones who don't so much talent work really hard, and they end up doing better than the ones that have talent. And I thought, oh, I never even would've known that. I would've thought that. I didn't know that hard work meant could mean more than talent. So hopefully you have talent, and then you can also make the choice to talentMichael Jamin:Work. And you learned this at a young age, you're saying thisSheila Heti:Part? I mean, my mother was also just very strict about working hardMichael Jamin:Right.Sheila Heti:Studies and stuff.Michael Jamin:Interesting. Yeah. She's a delian mom. Hungarian.Sheila Heti:Yeah.Michael Jamin:Do you speak any Hungarian?Sheila Heti:No. Do you? No.Michael Jamin:No, I don't. But I do know there's a Hungarian expression that really helped me. I'll tell you what it is. So do you speak any other languages?Sheila Heti:No,Michael Jamin:No, no. That's your next task. I wrote about this in one of my stories as well. There's a Hungarian expression where it says, okay, so let me take it back. So I learned to speak Spanish as a teenager and then Italian as an adult. So each time when you learn a new language that you're not born into, there's that moment where it's like it's really hard to talk. It takes months and months, and then finally one day you open your mouth and the words just come out without thinking just like that magic. And it's turning on a light bulb. And I've had a hard time explaining to people what that feels like. But then I discovered a Hungarian expression, which said it perfectly. It says, when you learn a little language, you gain a new soul. And I thought, that's exactly what it feels like, because you're talking, you're like, who is this? I don't speak this language. Who am I? That's incredible. And you talk about soul so much in your work. I thought maybe that's something you had experienced.Sheila Heti:I never got that far. I mean, I studied French and I never got close to a new soul. I didn't have always translation.Michael Jamin:You're always translating in your head,Sheila Heti:Right? Yeah.Michael Jamin:It's just that moment, like, I don't know who I am. And then you find yourself reacting differently. And also using, if I find myself, I can't say, I don't know how to say this, so I'll say it this way, which is not how I

Sheila Heti reads her story “According to Alice,” which appears in the November 20, 2023, issue of the magazine. Heti wrote this story in collaboration with a customizable chatbot on the Chai AI platform, which she began engaging in conversation in 2022. Heti is the author of seven books, including the novels “Motherhood,” which was short-listed for the Giller Prize, and “Pure Color,” which won the Governor General's Award last year.

Author of Upstairs Delicatessen:  On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading  Photo by Richard Bowditch YouTube video of the interview Links “Inside the NYT Book Review: Pamela Paul & Dwight Garner” (YouTube) Garner's Quotations: A Modern Miscellany by Dwight Garner (2020) Dwight Garner's book reviews in The New York Times To the Finland Station: A Study in the Acting and Writing of History (FSG) Classics by Edmund Wilson “A Book Critic as Wild for Food as He Is for Literature” by Jennifer Reese at The New York Times Book Review - October 24, 2023 Film reviews in The New Yorker by Anthony Lane Politics columns by Maureen Dowd in The New York Times Books by Cree LeFavour at Amazon.com “Jayne Anne Phillips Finds Anguish and Asylum in Civil War America” by Dwight Garner at The New York Times - September 23, 2023 Machine Dreams by Jayne Anne Phillips (Buy This Book!) Joni Mitchell - Blue (Full Album) at YouTube Joni Mitchell Court and Spark album Part 1 and Part 2 (YouTube) Books at Amazon.com by Sheila Heti, Otessa Moshfegh and Catherine Lacey “Review: ‘Martial Bliss,' a Loving Memoir About a Bookstore for Military Buffs” by Dwight Garner at The New York Times - July 30, 2015 Martial Bliss: The Story of The Military Bookman by Margaretta Barton Colt (not available on Kindle) Columns by William F. Buckley Jr. published in National Review Kindle Scribe Books at Amazon.com by the poets Kay Ryan, August Kleinzahler, Louise Glück, and James Fenton “Hunger games: A New York critic's gluttony for books and food” by Adam Begley at the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) - November 3, 2023 If you'd like brief updates on technology, books, marriage, and puppies, you can follow along with my Morning Journal flash briefing. From your Echo device, just say, “Alexa, enable Morning Journal.” Then each morning say, “Alexa, flash briefing?” I post a five-minute audio journal each weekday except usually by 10 a.m. Eastern Time.  Right-click here and then click "Save Link As..." to download the audio to your computer, phone, or MP3 player.