Relatable tales
Casey Plett’s short stories centre on trans characters while being accessible for anyone.
With her first book of short stories, 2014’s “A Safe Girl to Love,” Casey Plett became a writer to watch.
Her next book, the novel “Little Fish,” about a transgender woman living in Winnipeg, cemented her reputation, winning the Lambda Literary Award for transgender fiction in 2018.
Her new book — “A Dream of a Woman,” which centres the life of trans characters and is out Tuesday — was nominated for the Giller Prize before it even came out; she is the first trans person to appear on the list.
I began our conversation with congratulations — she’s living and teaching in Brooklyn, N.Y., right now and she and her roommate poured champagne and went to the roof of their apartment building to shout and celebrate when they heard — and asked her what the nomination means.
She said it’s for other people to draw wider conclusions, but “probably the main thing is that I hope that I’m just one of many to come. But it certainly is an honour. What I can say is that I’m more encouraged when these things are not so remarkable.
“Yes, I’m the first trans person to be on the list. But you know, I’m white. I have a college degree. I work in the publishing industry. So is that so remarkable?”
After the success of your novel “Little Fish,” you’ve returned to the short story form. Why’s that?
When I write, my process is very much letting the length of the thing reveal itself to me. “Little Fish” was the only time where, I remember I had like, 40, 50 pages and I thought, “Shoot, this is a novel, I’m going to have to write a novel, that’s gonna be difficult.” (Laughs) The stories in the new book, “A Dream of a Woman,” all sort of ended up revealing themselves to me as the length that they were. One story, “Rose City, City of Roses,” I imagined being a 100-page novella. But when I actually sat down to write it, it was short(er), distilled.
Picking up on that word ‘distilled,’ how much rewriting do you do? If you think something’s going to be long and then it becomes so, so tight, it must be an interesting process.
I do a lot — a lot — of revision. I can’t even count the amount of drafts those pieces have gone through. I’m very drawn to sort of understated things, to things that are hopefully clear but are very much between the lines. A lot of my characters don’t often really say how they feel or it’s sort of shrouded (in) these layers of things. For which I would say it’s very much in keeping with a Mennonite writer tradition; that’s when I feel myself very much a Mennonite writer. I take a lot of inspiration from people like Miriam Toews or Sandra Birdsell, Rudy Wiebe. Their writing is very organic, and it flows and it’s really pleasant to read. But there’s all these things happening under the surface of the stream you have to pay attention to pick up. In a lot of ways those writers kind of taught me how to write fiction.
While the stories centre trans characters, they’re also entirely relatable. They’re about becoming who you are, about betrayal, leaving yourself vulnerable, being human. Did you write them with a trans audience in mind or a wider audience?
I would say both, I guess. When I first started writing fiction … (I thought) I can make references or touch on things that maybe only certain types of trans people will get the broader nuances of, but you can still do that in a way that makes the book accessible for anyone to read.
I remember when I was 13 I ended up reading “Portnoy’s Complaint” by Philip Roth, which is a terrible book for a 13year-old to read. But I liked that book quite a bit. And as an adult, when I was learning to write fiction, I reflected on how, when I was 13 years old, I had never been east of the Mississippi River. I knew nothing about American Jewish life in the northeast, about life in the mid-century. I was a 13-year-old millennial from a Mennonite family in the Canadian prairies. But I did not need to know any of those references, because the writing was so alive and the characters were so real that I managed to read and enjoy the book anyway. When I’m writing I’m often trying to pay attention to: will a reader who knows what’s going on understand this? And will a reader who doesn’t (know) also understand it? You can write with these dual tracks in mind.
The stories are about people trying to carve out adult lives. What questions did you want to explore in this book that you didn’t in your others?
It was definitely something about relationships and love and long-term relationships. All these characters and most of the stories turn on a relationship that either is romantic or sexual, or was at one point and then becomes something else.
They’re beautiful stories about love and the complexity of love, and the complexity of emotions, and none of it’s straightforward in life. They’re relatable.
A lot of these stories came out of conversations and observations from straight cisgender friends. So even though the narrators who experienced them are all trans … it wasn’t just me and my trans friends I had in mind as I was writing this.
But you don’t go into these stories thinking about who the stories are for.
I don’t know who the stories are for. I just found myself being wrong about that so many times in history. When I wrote “Little Fish,” that book is about Mennonites. It’s not like it shuns religion, but I didn’t imagine practising Mennonites reading it … it’s such a sad book, it’s such a dark book, it’s such an explicit book. But I was proved wrong.
There were some people who did and seemed to like it. And I thought, “That’s on me,’ right?” It’s not for me to say who these are for. That’s not my job anymore once I’ve finished.
You just write the stories that come to you.
I think when I have written a character, I’m just trying to struggle with them; I’m trying to think what’s going on with them. Then there’s something that lets me stay in the world when I think of, what do I owe them? I owe them whatever the truth of their situation is. I owe them whatever the truth of their emotions are. I also owe them the truth of who they are even if some of those things are unsavoury … and that tends to let the writing situation be more dynamic and open to whatever the thing was they got me writing it in the first place.
When a book is about something that’s not in the mainstream, we tend to focus on the thing that’s not in the mainstream instead of the touchstones we have in common.
There was something somebody said to me that I found extremely moving. I’m trying remember who it was. But they said reading is very private, but literature is very communal. I think about that all the time. We all have these sort of fantastically personal and intimate ways that we approach a book. And that’s reading. And yet we have these extremely communal experiences when we talk about them and we share experiences about them. And that’s more communal. And I find that I find it kind of inspiring, you know?
You’ve founded a feminist press, called “LittlePuss.” What kind of books are you intending to publish?
I have to kind of keep my cards a little close to the chest because we’re not ready to announce the books that we’re working on yet. But I have to say we’re interested in books from people who aren’t necessarily come through usual writing/publishing circuits. People who say don’t have a history as a professional writer, or didn’t take writing workshops or writing programs or go to college. We’re definitely interested in books that are a little free-spirited, a little irreverent, a little madcap. And to quote my co-publisher, Cat, we certainly also are interested in sad, spare, beautiful books of wonderfully observed fiction.
What scares you most about sharing your own writing?
Fiction … is almost more intimate to me than non-fiction. Because with nonfiction you’re restricted to stuff that actually happened. Whereas in fiction, I feel like I’m saying I could have written about anything at all and this is what I have come up with. And there’s something that feels very naked about that. I’ve always felt I had to get over kind of fear that, you know, whoever I’m showing it to is going to go, “This is what’s on your mind?”