From plays, fiction and poetry, Kate Cayley’s work stretches across a large territory of genres. With a primary background in theatre, she has written two plays as playwright-in-residence for Tarragon Theatre from 2009-2017, and has collaborated with Halifax-based theatre company Zuppa Theatre on two experimental theatre pieces, The Archive of Missing Things and This is Nowhere. Her first book, The Hangman in the Mirror, is a young adult novel set in 18th century New France; it won the Geoffrey Bilson Award in 2012. Cayley’s collection of short stories, How You Were Born, won the 2015 Trillium Book Award and was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award. She has also published two books of poetry, the most recent of which, Other Houses, was published in 2017 by Brick Books. This diversity of genres is unified together by Cayley’s graceful and exact style, as well as her unrelenting curiosity to explore situations from unexpected angles.

The short stories of How You Were Born are short, carefully crafted snapshots of characters, subtle in their depth but powerful and fluent in how they develop and achieve their effect. They are evocative of the work of Alice Munro (one of Cayley’s main influences), but have a willingness to sit with and flesh out the unconventional twenty-first century preoccupations of Cayley’s own original characters. In the collection’s first story, “Resemblance,” a same-sex couple navigate the awkward dynamics of grieving for the man who was the sperm donor for the birth of their daughter as well as being their friend, bringing a poignant and realistic angle to an already exceptional situation. In “Midway Midgets and Giants, Photograph 1914,” Cayley gives life to the dwarf woman Rose as she performs in a circus across the dreariness of rural Ontario in 1914, daydreaming of the exciting life of the celebrity dwarf couple Tomb Thumb and Lavinia Warren. Cayley’s endings often restrain themselves from a dramatic moment of revelation or achievement, instead patiently working to recast the characters’ plights in the bittersweet light of time’s passage, revealing the stories as only small moments in the characters’ much longer, untellable lives.

The passage of time connects with another recurring preoccupation of Cayley’s work, which is history. Her work often encounters the strangeness and elusiveness of the past, flexing against its gaps and absences. This is where the playfulness in Cayley’s work is able to express itself most freely as her imagination fills in what the past cannot. In her play After Akhmatova, an American writer seeks to uncover the story behind a poem written in secret against the authoritarian USSR regime during the 1930s Great Purges, ultimately finding the personal history behind the poem hard to accept. The final section of her poetry book Other Houses, entitled “The Archive of the Missing,” playfully catalogues a list of missing people and objects, pulling at their fragments to get glimpses at an imperfect, unsolvable whole. This premise was also expanded in the Zuppa Theatre show The Archive of Missing Things in 2017, performed in Dalhousie’s Killam Library.

 This fall, Cayley will start as the writer in residence at McMaster University for the 2018-19 academic year. White Wall Review was lucky enough to have Cayley answer some questions about her work, influences, and process.

White Wall Review: What are some books that you’ve read recently or that you are currently reading that have left some impression on you?

KC: Books that make a deep impression on me are usually ones that feel like they are making me see something differently (like looking at your kitchen table from the floor instead of standing, and noticing all kinds of things in a pleasantly discombobulating way) while feeding a hunger I didn’t know I had until I was given the food. So, the books that have done that in the last year: Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien, Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado, The Doll’s Alphabet by Camilla Grudova, Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlman, Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi, and American Pastoral by Philip Roth, plus on the non-fiction side, Known and Strange Things by Teju Cole and Feel Free by Zadie Smith. In general, Yiyun Li, William Trevor, and Alice Munro are writers I keep returning to.

WWR: Do you keep up to date with a lot of the trends and debates in Canadian Literature? How important to you is being present and active in your contemporary cultural moment?

KC: Yes, I do, with a fair degree of unease. On the one hand, it seems narcissistically insular and somewhat affected to pretend not to notice what is going on all around you, on the other hand, it is possible to lose yourself and the time and privacy required to continue writing quietly, and the older I get, the more I think that continuing to write (at least for me) is connected to not engaging too much in trends or anxieties about relevance. I don’t know if that’s an answer, but I don’t have a better one, I’m afraid.

WWR: A lot of your work engages with historical figures, scenarios, or artifacts, whether fictional or real. Do you have any formal background in history? Do you spend a lot of time searching through historical sources for your ideas, or do ideas come more spontaneously, in passing?

KC: I am a total fraud when it comes to history. I have no background at all, and I am not a historian by temperament. I used to wish I had studied history, but I would have been terrible at it: I start inventing right away, based on a few stray facts that interest me, and I don’t usually investigate very deeply. But I am fascinated by the profound “otherness” of the past, and reassured also by the way that all times have been dark times. I find that hopeful. It makes me think we’ll get through.

WWR: Do you have some core guiding principles about writing that have motivated you and inspired you through your career? What are they?

KC: It changes all the time. Right now, I am thinking a lot about the need to separate politics from ideology. I think everything is, and should be, political, in the sense of politics being a keen and lively attention to the large and small reality of what exists, and an awareness that even shying away from explicit politics is a form of politics (sometimes in interesting ways: I feel like we underestimate the subversive qualities of ironic detachment). That’s crucial for a writer. On the other hand, fixed ideology (in any sense) is, I suspect, deadly, because ideological conviction can lead you to believe you know who someone is or what a situation is prior to truly observing it, to noticing it. I’m not saying I believe it’s possible to “notice” in some kind of neutral way (I don’t think that is possible), but I think it’s important to strive for full and complex noticing from all angles if you plan to write fiction. I struggle with this a lot, the need to dwell in ambiguity, in ambivalence. I’m paraphrasing, but the critic Parul Sehgal (I love her) has this great line about it being necessary, for fiction, that the writer never be convinced that they are on the right side of history. I don’t mean that the writer is somehow excused from moral struggle (nobody is) but that it has to remain struggle. Once you’re convinced you know what is right, you might as well give up and do something else.

WWR: Tell me more about your collaborations with Zuppa Theatre on The Archive of Missing Things and This is Nowhere. How did these come about? What was the process like, and how did the projects evolve into their final incarnation? How were they different from other work you’ve done?

KC: Okay, describing these shows, which I think I have to do, is going to be long-winded. They are immersive theatre pieces in which the audience encounters the performance in odd or unexpected ways.The Archive of Missing Thingsbrought the audience to a library in which they were directed to find places at individual desks overlooking the library atrium. Once there, they were given headsets and screens on which to access a mysterious online “archive” in which all missing objects in the world are collected and given a story. Music and dialogue came to the audience through the headsets and they were given ninety minutes to explore the archive and to uncover the story of why it was founded and by whom. But as the performance progressed, it became clear that some of the library patrons were performers, and that small events were unfolding in the atrium below that offered clues to the archive itself. Each audience member followed their own path through the archive and paid attention to different “clues,” so that each person, in a sense, created an individual performance for themselves, while investigating and musing on memory and time and trying to solve a mystery. Borges was a big influence.

This Is Nowhere is a huge piece (it will premiere in Halifax in September) based around the question of “the ideal city.” There are ten performance sites scattered throughout Halifax (an apartment, an art gallery, a café, and so on), and audience members are sent clues on an app on their phones. They have four hours to find all the sites. Each performance addresses (without directly answering) a question around “the ideal city,” broken down by theme: Justice, Love, Art, Inclusion, Play, Memory, etc. The hope is that the audience will be surprised, delighted, and invited to reflection without prescription. As with the archive, the performance unfolds differently for each person: the app sends audience members to different locations at random. After each encounter, the participants can write their own thoughts on the ideal city into the app, and at the end of the performance all participants will be brought into one location, where the collected thoughts will be shared publicly and a choir will sing.

I’m describing these things in exhaustive detail because I hope describing what they are will give a sense of how different they are from anything I’ve ever done. Both evolved out of my long friendship with the members of Zuppa Theatre, and out of a desire to make theatre that involved the audience in the act of making. Both have been exhilarating and entirely bewildering; I am very much writing in service to the director and the performers, writing on demand, rather than the writing being the starting point. Which is itself interesting: the way that traditional theatre puts the playwright at the centre has always seemed a little silly to me. Theatre is one of the most collaborative art forms, and it is a mess. The creation process on these shows embraces the mess.

WWR: What have you been working on lately?

KC: The text for This Is Nowhere. A novel. A new collection of short stories. Dreaming around another novel, but only vaguely.

WWR: Finally, how would you describe the space or niche that your writing takes up in the world?

KC: I have no idea. I wish I could answer this elegantly. I get superstitious about self-definition.