JMW: What’s most exciting about these books to you?
This is a strange year for me. I'm releasing two books: a science fiction novella called The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, and Opacities, a nonfiction book about writing, publishing, and friendship. Both books are experiments, so they're both exciting, but in different ways. The Practice is both a campus novel and an interstellar romp; its lively pace helped me think about plot and rhythm as I hadn't done before. Opacities combines genres: the diary, the writer's notebook, the personal letter. Writing it, I had to meet the demands of a very different form, almost like a collage, which was also a new and absorbing experience.
JMW: Do you see these books as new departures for you, a continuation of earlier work/themes, or some combination?
I started out in speculative fiction, so in some ways The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain is a return, while Opacities extends in a different direction, moving even further than The White Mosque into experimental nonfiction. I'm hoping that this weird year, in which I'm publishing both fiction and nonfiction, marks a turning point, and that I won't have to keep writing in both of these genres anymore! Will I finally find my genre?
JMW: Do you see your work as “Mennonite,” and how or how not? (We know this is a ridiculously broad and fraught question, so feel free to respond in whatever way seems right to you.)
Everybody is made of stories, but writers are made of stories in a particularly intense way. The tales we've heard, the books we've read, and the songs we've sung are the foundation of our artistic practice. So my work is definitely Mennonite, because it's infused with the language of a Mennonite upbringing and education: hymns, martyr stories, missionary recollections, theological debates, the Bible.
JMW: What themes, issues, techniques, and/or other authors were most in your mind as this project came into being?
I'll focus on the theme shared by Opacities and The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain. Despite their surface differences, both books critique a form of identity politics that herds people into rigid categories. In The Practice, the characters live on a starship with a cruel and implacable caste system. In Opacities, I relate experiences and feelings around this type of culture in the publishing world, especially the demand for writers to brand themselves with a certain identity and then stick to it rigorously. To me, this is not a human way of being.
JMW: What part(s) of your writing process might other writers find useful, either to imitate or to avoid?
I read a lot. That's something I would recommend. I spend at least twice as much time reading as I do writing--some days, three or four times as much. Those are good days. As for what to avoid: when I wrote my memoir, The White Mosque, I talked about it while I was writing it and read from it publicly before it was finished. I hadn't done that with my other books, but I had this idea that it was what writers did, that I should share my work-in-progress. This was a mistake. I figured it out and quit sharing the book after a year or two, but people still knew I was writing it and would ask me questions about it! This won't happen again.