A Conversation with Sydney Hegele, author of the new novel Bird Suit

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Sydney Hegele, a past contributor to Earth & Altar and the author of the stunning new novel Bird Suit. The characters, the community, the families, the folklore, the spiritualities, and the relationships Hegele crafts in this story captivated me. I was deeply moved by the way the tale guides readers through an exploration of how our humanity and our memory—especially, but not only, our painful memories—construct one another.

In this conversation, Hegele lays out some of the theological, creative, and personal risks and challenges they faced on their journey of writing this book. I highly encourage readers to read and review the novel themselves. 

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TS

Could we start off with the story of how this story came to be?

SH

I started working on [Bird Suit] in early 2019, about a year after I'd finished the first drafts of my story collection [The Pump], which was about collective and private traumas in a small, isolated, Southern Ontario town. I was thinking a lot about domestic relationships within small towns and how there’s this tourist-ideated perception of ‘pastoral Canada’ essentially sitting on top of a lot of people's histories and current realities of class disparity and displacement. 

I was also attempting to answer a question I’d been thinking about for a while: Who or what do we blame when terrible things happen, and why do we blame who or what we blame? The bird women, or sirens, came from that question. These mythological creatures, with their monstrous and intentional weaponization of sexuality, luring men to their death. What if these ‘siren songs’ were being collectively misinterpreted, and these bird women weren't singing to intentionally trap men, but merely singing for one another? Why do we demonize women for existing, instead of holding men accountable for their violence? 
I was thinking through all these things while starting therapy for the first time, so I think the complications between these different narratives kind of created a perfect storm. 

TS

So the image of the sirens–is that what developed into the characters of the Birds?

SH

Yeah. I had an interesting university experience where most of my English Literature classes taught the exact same ‘canon’ texts, save for a select few, meaning that I would read a work five or six different times for five or six different classes within my four years. And one of those texts was Homer's The Odyssey. I wouldn’t say that The Odyssey isn’t a text worth studying, but when we're studying the same text from the same perspectives from the same geographical regions, it is quite limiting and repetitive, honestly. I got the most out of the text when it was taught to me by scholars who valued critical thinking and risk-taking and research that cared less about regurgitation and more about asking questions. Homer’s sirens are depicted as bird women in that text specifically, so I think that’s where the original bird image came from for me. But it really kind of complicated itself and evolved from there.
TS

That's a perfect segue into our next question: Were there moments throughout the writing of this book in which the plot or the characters took on a life or a direction of their own, or became self determining in a way? Did they ever surprise you? 

SH

Absolutely. I really didn't quite understand what people meant by characters taking on a life of their own until I had that experience writing and rewriting and rewriting this novel over a matter of years. 

It took a lot of intentional learning and unlearning and learning again to feel comfortable entering a place of play, trying anything and everything in an attempt to trust my creative intuition a little more.

As I was attempting that, I was incredibly privileged to already have people who were interested in the book. But writing a book and publishing a book are two very different things, and I definitely let the latter interfere with the former. Publishing needs everything yesterday, and it is easy to see the immediate monetary benefit of quantity over quality early in your career. My short story collection was about to come out, and Bird Suit finally had representation, and there was this self-imposed pressure to get the novel finished and out on submission as soon as possible. 

It can be beneficial to be thinking about genre and audience and marketing while writing, but I personally started letting those things influence me too early. Even though I've always been someone who prefers genre-blending and more experimental forms of narrative, I found myself very quickly having to place the story and the characters and the text in these bite-sized, easily digestible categories. In the year leading up to submission, I had written four full drafts of the book that were wildly different from one another. I intuitively knew where the narrative had to go and where the characters were leading me very early on, but in every rewrite, I stressed about how ‘digestible’ that narrative would really be, and the complications that could follow the book's publication. Maybe it would be judged, or I would be judged. Maybe readers didn't want to see characters suffering, and I owed them some relief. Maybe I owed my characters something different. Something happier. 

Right before [Bird Suit] went out on submission, the entire end of part two and all of part three were completely different. And I knew in my gut that, at that point, it wasn't quite the book that I wanted to put out in the world, but I was honestly scared.

When I signed with Invisible Publishing, I asked them if I could take an extra month to completely rewrite the last third of the book on my own before starting formal developmental edits. And I'm really, really grateful that they, without even being told what the plan was for it, were so trusting of me and trusting that I was serious about it. And now Bird Suit feels like the story these characters were moving toward by themselves all along. Rather than just fighting the characters and trying to fit them into more comfortable, predictable sorts of narratives, I let them exist in more complication, confusion, doubt, and humanity.  

TS

You used the phrase: it felt at times as if I owed my character something. And even that reflects them taking on a life of their own, because they have to be subjects in their own right for them to be owed anything. So I wonder if the different rewrites play along with that motif of the characters themselves calling for revisions and rewrites. Though a story or a version of the story is complete, the characters within it are calling for another version of that story to be written.

SH

Absolutely. Though I’ve found that it also has a lot to do with the public discourse around representation and fiction specifically. 

I found myself in an odd moment when my first book came out where, to me, representation for queer characters, for characters who had experienced similar things as I experienced in life, was just about widening the amount of stories we saw and the complexity of characters and stories. But there was a lot of discourse in writing and publishing circles at that point a few years ago, about every representation of a character needing to be completely and utterly positive. To be this sort of one dimensional, positive representation. Positive is so subjective, but there were a lot of folks calling for, in their minds, the core objective of every queer character to be well- behaved and represent the queer community in a way that's positive rather than complicated.

And they can't do anything morally wrong, because that would look bad on the community as a whole. And people who have experienced hardship should always be given a chance to have a happy ending after that, because that doesn't happen a lot in real life. 

There’s a lot to be said about equating fictional harm on a fictional character within a narrative to real violence enacted on real people. Which isn't to say that words do not have the power to enact violence on people–they absolutely do. 

But when I was in these sorts of rewrites and feeling like the characters were taking on roles of their own and complications of their own, I would often hold back and second-guess myself because of that call to one dimensional, exclusively positive representation. I felt like I owed the community at large a queer character who was just morally good, who didn't do anything wrong. 

Once I stopped doing that and just let the characters dictate what they needed and what the narrative needed, how it was already naturally folding upon itself and what it was leading towards, I found it to be a lot less of a battle between what I thought people wanted for me and what I should be writing.

TS

At certain points, both Isaiah and Georgia pose a version of the question, “Who would I be without my pain?”. They both fear that they won’t be themselves, or perhaps anyone at all. Isaiah only gets to take the very first step in trying to answer that question in another way. Georgia has more opportunity to, which is perhaps most beautifully portrayed in the moment where she is speaking to all of her different selves. But Arlo never gives himself a chance to answer that question in a positive way. Even though he crafts a life that in many respects is beautiful, he never seems to be able to do what James did—construct a different kind of love than the one he’d been shown. What did you learn or explore with respect to this question through the writing process?

SH

I was definitely exploring two different ways of answering that question while writing: one was more theological, and the other was more psychological. 

Talking about childhood trauma or any sort of past hardship can often lead to a response of “all of that made you who you are today. You could never be as strong and resilient as you are right now if you hadn’t gone through those things.” It’s a response that a lot of folks get both inside and outside the Church. I had the mentality for a long time that the best art was only created from a place of deep pain and disturbance, and in order to create something meaningful, I had to really tap into and return to places of immense pain. 

I also started writing Bird Suit shortly after my dissociative disorder diagnosis, which has always and will always have a very large impact on my perception of memory and sense of self. 

Dissociation raises these walls between different aspects of self. Dissociative disorders can usually only form before the ages of seven to nine, and they are always caused by repeated traumatic interruptions to formation of self in the development of a child's brain. In the early days of my diagnosis, I was trying to make sense of who I was in my entirety, and how my sense of self was neurologically shaped by what I had experienced. Who I would be without my pain. 

I personally find that the best books don't necessarily give you one tidy answer for the questions they pose, but continue to diligently, despite discomfort, ask those kinds of questions anyway. And even though I don't have an answer of who I would be without those kinds of experiences, I do feel more comfortable saying that I am more than just those experiences.

Theologically, I don’t believe in a God who promises that nothing traumatic or bad will ever happen to me ever again. His promise is that yes, things were difficult, and they will continue to be really difficult, and you were my child through that, and you will continue to be my child, and that doesn't mean that everything will be perfect or that you won't be confused about who you are or who I am or what on earth is going on here on earth. But it does mean that we are who we are amidst all of this messiness, and there is still love here, even if it's difficult to see.

TS
Towards the end of the novel, “Georgia… wonders if God is trapped in the same predicament, weighed down with prayers that He can't answer, prayers that he carries around because they remind him of us. Prayers that help him remember.” To me, this was a fascinating theological idea that reminds me of how some process theologians view God. Could you talk a little bit about this question or other theological questions you hope the story brings to readers attention?

SH

I think that this has a lot to do with that original idea of when bad things happen, when terrible things happen, when people are hurt, who do we blame and why do we blame them, and where do we go from there? A lot of the characters in the book have different understandings of blame in relation to God or sense of self. A lot of characters blame themselves, and a lot of characters also have these unrealistic expectations of themselves or of God. Like they themselves shouldn’t have let things happen, or God Himself shouldn’t have let things happen.

I’m still perpetually working through what it means to have a creator who cares so deeply for His creation, but then to see so much worldwide groaning and pain and destruction and genocide and suffering. How can I reconcile these two things at the same time? The only answer that I've been able to find comfort in is that I don't need to see these things as separate. It isn’t there is a God who loves us, but then there is also this separate suffering on earth; I find comfort and confusion in equal measure in the fact that God is groaning and suffering with us, with His creation, and weeping when His creation is killed. Weeping with us. He invites that lament. Tragedy isn’t in conflict with how God sees us and is in us and in our world. I don't see how our creator could have created something with so much emotional instability as a human being, and then would get angry at us or not want us to express all facets of human experience, including doubt, lament, anger, suffering, and questioning. I think it would be very strange if we saw God in every person suffering on earth, and we didn't feel anything about it, and we weren't angry and doubtful and questioning ourselves and questioning our institutions and questioning Him.

It’s like the Psalmist’s relationship with God. It isn't bad things happen, but God is good; it’s bad things happen, and God is good in it, and he is lamenting with us and suffering with us.