Pasha Malla, author of The Withdrawal Method, shares his thoughts on writing in this exclusive interview with Evadne Macedo, author of The 29^th Day: A Novel.

The Withdrawal Method won the 2009 Trillium Book Award and the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. The Withdrawal Method was also longlisted for the Giller Prize, shortlisted for the 2009 Common Wealth Writer’s Prize: Best First Book, selected as one of the Globe and Mail Best 100 Books of the Year (2008) and included on the Canada Also Reads longlist.

1. The range and versatility of your writing is remarkable. You are able to affect completely different approaches and tones depending on the type of writing you are doing – your pieces in McSweeney’s are irreverent and ridiculously comical while your articles are analytical and thought provoking. Each of the short stories in The Withdrawal Method is so unique as to cause anxiety in the reader as to what they might mean taken as a collection (a sort of Emperor’s New Clothes scenario). Other than being brilliantly imaginative and well-executed, your writing defies categorization – you can, and will, write anything. Do you agree with this assessment? Which type of writing do you enjoy the most, and why?

I like doing all kinds of writing, and I like to read all sorts of different stuff: right now I’m reading a Robert Coover novel, a Stephen King collection of stories, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop (Jeff Chang’s history of hip hop) and Gregoire Bouillier’s memoir, Report on Myself. I like to keep my reading varied, fresh and challenging, and the same goes for my writing (and a lot of other stuff in my life). I always want the experience of sitting down at my computer to feel invigorating, as opposed to a chore, and I’ve found the best way to do that is to keep a variety of projects and genres and styles on the go. Oh, and the writing I enjoy most is the writing that’s going well, whatever that may be.

2. At the Jan 16. 2010 Humber Writers’ Circle, you said you had been writing stories since age four or five (with a short break in the teen years). When was the first time someone recognized your talent? Did anyone provide you with some kind of support that was particularly helpful to you in your development as a writer? Did people discourage you from investing in writing as a way to make a living?

The first thing I ever published was an editorial in the local paper when I was in high school. I’d been coaching kids’ soccer and a few of the parents were a bit overly competitive, so I wrote an open letter sort of thing telling them to relax. I liked communicating with people I both knew and didn’t know in written words, something I’d never really considered before; it gave me a chance to sit down and really think about what I wanted to say. So I guess my motivation for writing came mainly from myself (and of course reading awesome stuff and thinking, “I want to do that!”) and though I’ve had some low-times, and lots of great people have helped me through them, ultimately I always feel that it’s up to me to get back to it. I never really paid attention to people who doubted that I could make a living as a writer; I always just figured they were idiots who didn’t know what they were talking about. Or, maybe, if I did, I took their doubt as a challenge. I was just like, “I’m going to work my ass off and make this happen, fuck you.”

3. In your March 2009 Globe and Mail article, you speak about the importance of challenging the unconscious racial biases that each of us holds. You refer to Harvard’s implicit association test or a “racism journal,” as tools to help society move beyond tolerance or superficial acceptance. As I noted in more detail in Question 3 of my interview with Kim Moritsugu, stereotypes about race also arise in relation to fiction. In her response, Kim Moritsugu spoke of transcending racial stereotypes, but wondered if that would ever happen. If the idea of fiction is to enable us, as writers and readers, to get inside someone else’s skin, why is there still such a focus on the writer’s own race?  As we discussed in the January 16, 2010 Humber Writers’ Circle, a writer needs to put forward an original story with a convincing voice. If this is done effectively, why should a writer’s race ever be relevant to the analysis of book’s merit or suitability for publication?

I don’t know that I agree that the idea of fiction is to create or foster empathetic experience. I think it’s more — for both writers and readers — to help create fluency with what it is to be a human being and to make us feel a little less alone in the world. Empathy can certainly be part of that, but I don’t know that reading or writing fiction makes us necessarily more compassionate or understanding of other people — it’s a nice thought, for sure, but is it true?

As for race, the publishing industry is guilty of aestheticizing ethnicity and lumping work by specific groups together to form contrived genres for the sake of easy marketing. Go into a bookstore and pull out all the books by South Asian women, for example: they’ll have more or less the same exotic, sepia-toned cover featuring spices/ Mughal architecture/ saris, with some sort of vaguely Hindi or Arabic lettering… It’s depressing.

Mainly, I just think books should be judged on whether they’re any good or not, independent of any cultural or racial context.

4. When you set out to write a short story or novel, what are your goals in terms of plot, character development or the craft of writing itself? Would you say that your current process has been refined over time from less successful methods, or is this how you have always written? Are there any non-fiction guides or great works of literature that you have found helpful in improving your writing?

I don’t ever really have any specific goal other than to try to make the thing that comes out on paper as close as possible to the ideal of it I have in my head. And part of that is of course a process of continual failure — trying something, realizing it hasn’t succeeded, so trying again. I’m competitive by nature, so I’m always pushing myself to get closer to that ideal, whatever it might be. Again, I think it’s about finding fluency with oneself, of being able to get down on paper exactly how you feel and think and experience the world, of capturing and articulating some intrinsically personal — and, ideally, universal — truth.

5. Like Deborah Willis, author of Vanishing and Other Stories, who I interviewed on November 25, 2009, you have published your first book, and received literary accolades, at a relatively young age. You have also accumulated demonstrable expertise in the field of writing – in addition to writing books, you teach courses at U of T, mentor writers through the Banff Centre, judge literary contests and supervise graduate students. Given your past accomplishments, what goals do you have in terms of growing as a writer or teacher of writing? Which writers or resources do you rely on to support that growth?

A lot of people have been really good to me and I’ve been lucky to have been offered a lot of amazing opportunities — such as the past summer, which I spent at the Pierre Berton House in Dawson City. That said, I work really hard and feel that any success I’ve had has been very much earned. My goals are to continue to push myself and write the best stuff I can, to recognize what my weaknesses are as a writer and work on them. I’m fortunate to have an awesome family and a lot of great friends who are supportive in all sorts of ways, not just in looking at my stuff and fixing my sentences, or whatever, but personally, emotionally, etc. It’s ideal, whatever you do, to have good people around you for support, but who will also be honest with you when you’re being a shithead and need a kick in the pants.

6. At every writing event I have gone to, there is always a question about the mechanics of an author’s writing. Could you please comment on the practicalities behind your writing? For example, do you keep notes in a notebook? If so, at what point to you transfer them to a computer? Do you write on a laptop or a desktop? Do you hide yourself away in a quiet room or write at cafés? And the biggest question of all: Do you use a Mac or a PC?

I don’t use a notebook that much — only when I’m traveling, really – and I do my typing on a $600 Toshiba laptop, which is fine. I work best at home. I listen to music sometimes, but mainly instrumental music as I find words and lyrics distracting. I have a writing uniform, which is generally big baggy basketball shorts, a hooded sweatshirt, a toque, and slippers. I think I look sort of funny when I write, but at least I’m comfortable!

7. When CBC asked you to name some of your favourite funny books, you listed 27 books divided into sub-categories. I quite liked the subtle humour in the opening lines of “The Slough,” the first short story in The Withdrawal Method, but am most excited by the more adventurous comedy of your McSweeney’s pieces. Are you consciously able to moderate the amount of humour you apply to a particular piece of writing, or do you just write and see how funny it turns out to be? How has the sense of humour in your writing been influenced by the books you listed?

I never sit down and think, “Okay, I need to write a humour piece;” I just let stuff come out. It’s nice to let your brain surprise you every now and then.

8. I feel gratified when people tell me they laughed or cried when reading certain parts of my novel, The 29^th Day – I had wanted my readers to feel a range of emotions when reading it. Have you ever tried to make people cry, and if so, do you find this harder than making them laugh?

I don’t really think about other people’s reactions to my writing: mainly it has to work for me, which is to say that if it’s meant to be funny (or sad), I have to find it funny (or sad), etc. I’m a pretty harsh critic of my own writing, though I’ve published plenty of stuff that at some point I thought was succeeding at whatever I thought it was trying to do, and now I look back on and cringe. I don’t know if it’s harder to make people laugh or cry. There are shortcuts to both: an easy way to make people cry is to have a dog die, and an easy way to make them laugh is to have a sophisticated gentleman in a tuxedo get hit in the crotch by a small, drunk child.

9.  I understand that you are writing a young adult novel based on your racism journal – this sounds very interesting, can you describe it in more detail?

The YA novel is on hold for now, but something I’d like to get back to at some point.

10. As a teacher of writing and a writer who likes to edit compulsively, what shows that a piece of writing is finished? How would you define success in the field of fiction writing? From your experience, what are the defining skills, characteristics or approaches used by students who have achieved their own goals or success as you define it? What common factors result in manuscripts being left unfinished, or unpublished?

I don’t know if a piece of writing is ever really finished; you can tinker with something forever if you really want. I guess stuff just gets to a point where it’s about as far as it’s ever going to go and then you abandon it — think of eventually having to let your kids head out into the world on their own, maybe, and just hoping that they remember to wear a coat you bought them. Though maybe the analogy falls apart once you start dressing it up…

11. You have said elsewhere that you consciously avoid looking at your writing as a commodity, you do not want to see your book readings as promotional events, you do not have a blog and you do not want to consider how your work will be received as you write it. Despite this, or because of this, it seems that your writing is very successful – what do you see as the pitfalls of the commercialization of writing? Until I met you, I had assumed that the “Unofficial Pasha Malla Resource Centre” was operated by you anonymously, as a sort of wry joke. But, you have nothing to do with it– what do you know about the origins of this blog?

Oh, that site is run by Kevin Fanning, whom I’ve never met but seems like a really nice guy. He just emailed me one day and asked if I minded if he put up some links to my stuff online, and of course I didn’t. Bonus! As for commercialization, I don’t know, I don’t exactly write heady, formally challenging stuff — my stories are pretty accessible, even commercial when you look at language poets or other much more experimental writers than me. I just like to keep the business end of things away from what I do, sitting at the computer. The book as a saleable commodity is a fact of my line of work, but it’s the end result, once everything is out of my hands. I like to let my publisher take care of that stuff and just worry about writing.

12. In my interview with Kim Moritsugu, I spoke about the capacity of novels and novelists to provoke social change in one way or another. I know you recently spoke at an event to raise funds for Frontier College in support of literacy and wonder what links you see between your fiction writing and social causes.

I suppose the novel I’m working on right now has a certain social justice aspect to it (it’s about, among other things, housing project relocations), though I never want to get preachy or polemic in my work. To me the point of fiction isn’t to make statements, it’s to ask questions: I want to open up the reader’s experience of the world, not try to replace it with my own.

13. Do you have any final words of advice or encouragement for aspiring writers?

Yeah, do other shit. Don’t just write. Get out and live a little.

This interview was originally posted by Evadne Macedo at http://books.macedo.ca on February 17, 2010.

For more information about Pasha Malla, visit the Unofficial Pasha Malla Resource Centre, the House of Anansi website or the Anne McDermid & Associates website. There are many excellent interviews with Pasha Malla, but my favourite is the audio file of Pasha Malla’s delightful conversation about The Withdrawal Method with his mother (where he also describes the theme behind the stories in the Withdrawal Method).  Online, you can also find some of the writing Pasha has done for McSweeney’s– one of my favourites is Pasha’s postcolonial perspective on the all-you-can-eat buffet at Bombay Palace.

See also Evadne Macedo’s previous interviews and profiles, posted at http://books.macedo.ca:

• Kim Moritsugu: The Restoration of Emily, The Glenwood Treasure, Old Flames, Looks Perfect (February 3, 2010)
• Terry Fallis: The Best Laid Plans (Leacock Medal 2008) (January 20, 2010)
• June Hutton: Underground (January 6, 2010)
• Thomas Trofimuk: The 52nd Poem, Doubting Yourself to the Boneand Waiting for Columbus (December 16, 2009)
• Gina Buonaguro & Janice Kirk: Ciao Bella and The Sidewalk Artist(December 9, 2009),
• Don LePan: Animals (December 2, 2009)
• Ray Robertson: David (November 25, 2009)
• Deborah Willis: Vanishing and Other Stories (GG Finalist) (November 19, 2009)
• Joy Fielding: Still Life & many other novels (November 14, 2009)

Visit http://books.macedo.ca for Evadne Macedo’s upcoming interviews with Anar Ali (Baby Khaki’s Wings), John Bemrose (The Island Walkers; The Last Woman) and Priscila Uppal (Poet-in-residence for Canadian Athletes Now Fund (CAN Fund) during the 2010 Vancouver Olympics and Paralympics (February 12-28, 2010) and author of Ontological Necessities, The Divine Economy of Salvation, To Whom it May Concern: A Novel and Successful Tragedies).