With Kaylie Seed
Photo by Rossanne Clamp
While I know that you have previously written a poetry collection (a book I cannot wait to get my hands on, by the way!), I just want to say congratulations on the publishing of your debut novel The Birth Yard! I thoroughly enjoyed The Birth Yard and I’m so excited to have the chance to interview a fellow Canadian. If you wouldn’t mind, I have some questions to ask you about The Birth Yard as well as your writing process.
Before women are sent to the Birth Yards they live with their families in The Den. What inspired the idea of The Den and the cult-like following that resides there?
As someone who grew up in a very traditional Catholic family, the idea this powerful institution and faith carrying on a perpetuation of heteronormativity, homophobia and othering with the protected term of “religion” has always fascinated me, especially when I pivoted away from faith and became an atheist. Sable, once she has more growth and understanding of her own maturation, sort of gets her own bird’s eye view of her world, her culture. I think maybe the same thing happened to me with Catholicism.
But I think the very first time I was captivated by extremist cults was during an Oprah episode I watched after school covering when the FLDS compound led by Warren Jeffs was raided. Many girls who had been sexually abused were rescued and put on live television to tell their stories. I thought of those girls as I was writing The BY.
There are so many different rituals and rules in The Den; can you tell our readers what kind of research you had to do for The Birth Yard?
I think we’re really fortunate to live in a time where so much media and narrative on topics of our choice are very much at our fingertips. It doesn’t take much to get a top ten list of infamous cults such as the FLDS, People’s Temple, the Westboro Baptist Church, Children of God, The Source Family, and so on. There is a scene in The BY where the girls are forced to drink Feles’ hair and blood steeped into tea. I based this from the Aum Supreme Truth Cult in Japan who drank their leader’s blood as an initiation ritual. What I also think is really interesting is how much cults have in common no matter what their mission statements are, who their leaders are or what their numbers are. The main goal is control of its participants, the washing away of individuality and encouraging ultimate devotion. This control is achieved through labour (the members of the Source Family cult in California actually sold their houses and moved to work in the cult’s vegan restaurant and gave all of their earnings to the leader), through control of fertility and the female body (FLDS child-brides were and still are forced into polygamy at tragically young ages), and through chemical indoctrination through the use of drugs (Israel’s Lev Tahor cult forced its members to take psychotropic drugs). The examples of control tactics are endless once you really go down the rabbit hole. I actually had challenges picking and choosing how The Den would enforce its rules and what kind of rituals they would abhold. They’re less of a spiritual/propaganda group and more drug-oriented than anything else. And while the “cult rabbit hole” I went down was fascinating, it’s not dissimilar from True Crime narratives—they’re heavy. They’re pain-filled. They’re unkind. It wasn’t always easy to research if I’m honest.
As a follow-up to the question above, what was the most challenging theme to write about in The Birth Yard and why was it an important theme to portray and work through?
The sexual assault and abuse brought into the lives of characters I’d grown to love. The silencing of their voices. Their hurt and fearfulness. But without emulating the pain of young women who currently live in cults, or those who have lost their lives in cults or who survived their experiences and escaped, the book would feel inauthentic, too sanitized. Sable’s resilience through her pain is what makes the novel move and find a sense of light in the dark. So yes, writing about Mamie’s molestation at the hands of Isaac or how Lion hurts the girls at the yard made me bitterly uncomfortable and sad but I think it was important because there is truth and gravity to that pain. And there is strength within the women of The Den to hold love for themselves and one another as a result of shared trauma and experiences.
Sable goes from a timid, conforming girl to a boisterous, freethinking woman. Where did your inspiration for Sable come from? We’d also like to know more about creating her unique voice!
Thank you for saying her voice was unique. I haven’t been eighteen for a decade now (haha) so I tried to develop the youth in her voice—the curiosity, the naivety and then this anti-authoritarian underbelly that seems to storm out of her by the time she is at the Ceres yard. I have three sisters and we were all born within six years of each other. I think seeing how different we are, how close yet independent we are while having the same childhood fascinates me. When did we all of the sudden question our own faith-filled home lives, our own rules and rituals, our own losses, achievements and failures and make sense of them independent from our parents and one another? I am not sure. It just happened. It just happens to young people. This slow sense of reaching toward your own autonomy and your own sense of self once you’re almost into adulthood is so vulnerable and beautiful. I think it happens to Sable in the same way it happens to all young people. Except for her, it happens once she becomes pregnant and her innocence is truly fading. It’s the same way any teenager may ask themselves what do I believe in? Who do I want to surround myself with? Who do I want to be? But the situation for Sable is more dire and extreme because The Den is such a harsh, controlling environment.
What was the most surprising thing that you learned while going through the process of creating and writing The Birth Yard?
I learned I struggle with spatial descriptions—A lot of going up and down stairs in those Den bungalows early on!
On a more serious note, I honestly learned more about the female body and pregnancy. I am not a mother and have never been pregnant. So I had to have a lot of dialogues with women I knew who had had those experiences as well as did some research into a more specific anatomical look at what happens to the body and the mind in each trimester. It’s not always a dramatic water break in a taxi on the way to the hospital like on television. And it’s not just always having to pee and craving dill pickles and being cranky. Pregnancy is so slow and delicate and terrifying and full of so much anticipation physically and emotionally. I had to work harder to understand what that might feel like and unlearn stereotypes and preconceptions of what pregnancy is.
With such a fantastic debut novel, I have to ask, will there be another book from you soon?
Thank you! I am currently working on a novel about reality television. That’s all I’ll say because it’s still marinating with possibility and plot. But it will be funny/satirical. Unlike The BY.
As someone who also works in the publishing field and who has founded a publishing house, how different is the process of publishing your own novel through a publisher compared to being a publisher yourself?
I’ve never been asked this question before! So I am the publisher of Rahila’s Ghost Press. We publish limited edition poetry chapbooks. I think there are similarities in that, as a publisher, I feel a responsibility to care for our author’s work, wishes and sentiments. At HarperCollins, they did the same for me. It’s also really nice to get a sense of what the experience is like on the publishing side of things to have a fuller understanding of the process, the labour and the love that goes into bringing a book into the world.
As a follow-up question to the one above, what advice would you give to aspiring authors who are trying to navigate the publishing world
Read work by the publishers you admire. Volunteer at literary festivals and get to know local published authors in your community. Build up literary journal publications to help with being eligible for grants that can help fund your larger writing projects. Listen to the editorial boards and readers who may say no to your work—don’t see it as a personal insult and be open-minded to modifying and shifting the work to hold more clarity, relevance or timeliness. Rejection 100% stings but without it, you can’t improve and make alterations to your art. It’s an opportunity to reset and try a new approach until you work toward making a piece tonally intriguing, mechanically sound, socially conscious and uniquely your own voice.
What is your “must-read” book recommendation and what book has had the most impact and influence on your writing?
My must-read right now is How A Woman Becomes a Lake by Marjorie Celona. Stunning, muscular, highly narrative book with a good edge of mystery. It’s one I couldn’t put down. And the dialogue is exquisite.
I always come back to Jeffrey Eugenide’s The Virgin Suicides as one of my all-time favourites. It’s lush, chorally narrated, atmospherically mesmerizing and I have still yet to read anything else quite like it.