Miriam Toews
Miriam Toews
Miriam Toewsis a Canadian writer, best known for her novels A Complicated Kindness and All My Puny Sorrows. She has won a number of literary prizes including the Governor General's Award for Fiction and the Writers' Trust Engel/Findley Award for body of work. She is also a two-time finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and a two-time winner of the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionWriter
CountryCanada
Miriam Toews quotes about
aspect fiction kids order playful restore seem sort
When everything does seem out of control, writing fiction is a way I can order that chaos and restore some sort of meaning. I like the playful aspect of writing fiction. You know how it is when we are kids and we make up our worlds: You be this guy, and I am going to be this guy, and we are going to go slay dragons.
depressed incumbent people ridiculous sister smile
With my father and sister being very depressed for most of their lives, it was incumbent on me to try to make them laugh, in this ridiculous way. They were the wittiest people I knew, but to get a smile from them was like winning the lottery.
becomes cathartic create easier experience felt helps order outpouring understand whatever
Writing helps me to create order out of chaos and make sense of things. It helps me to understand what I've experienced, what I've felt and seen, so it becomes a little easier to handle. On the other hand, I don't want it to be just a cathartic experience, an outpouring of grief or whatever it is.
background genuine good love religious strive
You don't need a religious background to strive for something good, for genuine compassion and love for others.
becomes human knowable
When a person becomes a legend, the very thing that makes them human and knowable is killed off, so it's like being killed over and over and over again, for all eternity.
against brain coherent coming experience feeling sore stops struggling thread writer
A writer is always, always searching, even against her will, against all her better instincts, for the thread of a story. Everything is fodder. Everything is fuel. You can feel it coming on like the tingling of a sore throat. The brain never stops struggling to reshape every experience and feeling into a coherent narrative.
age
There was no freer soul in the world than me at age nine.
asking draft editors elaborate encourage hard letters publishers requests sure writers
The requests for blurbs seem to come in waves. I'm not sure what precipitates them. I think it must be excruciating for editors to draft those elaborate letters asking for a blurb, and I know it's torturous for us writers to ask directly. But publishers encourage us to. Rock and a hard place.
comic perceived
The British are actually a lot more appreciative of the comic. In Canada, if you're perceived as a comic writer, there's a real snobbery, and you can't be serious. You're not a big hitter.
amount depressed enormous inner pushed
A depressed person is often a person who will push others away. If you are pushed away and pushed away and pushed away, you have to have an enormous amount of inner resources to keep going back.
featured settings sixth time
'Irma Voth' is my sixth book, but it's only the third time I've featured Mennonite settings and characters.
ignore leave
Ignore all advice about writing. Leave your blood on every page. Every page!
believe decent heaven human life reasonably sorts within
There are so many things in my life that would be completely not on within the conservative church. And yet I think of myself as a reasonably decent human being. With all sorts of flaws, you know, but still reasonably decent. If I did believe in Heaven and Hell, I would really, honestly, believe I was going to go to Heaven.
against agents canada country itself outdated practices special valiant
Canada has, at times, represented itself as a country in a valiant struggle against powerful and menacing agents that are indifferent to its special practices and sensibilities - most especially American culture. It's the old, outdated garrison mentality.