Photo by Jenny Fisher (Left: Steven Heighten, Right: Rob Winger)
Steven Heighten was the latest writer to visit Traill as part of the Writer’s Readings series.
The Toronto native and Queen’s graduate read both poetry and short fiction to a nearly full Scott House JCR.
Heighten has been making a career out of both poetry and short fiction for quite a while now.
In 1989, he was the winner of the Air Canada Award for most promising writer under the age of 30. In the same year won the Gerald Lampert Award for his first book of poetry, Stalin’s Carnival.
Heighten started with the poem Address Book, dedicated to a friend named ‘Mad Carl’, before reading a piece from his short fiction anthology The Dead Are More Visible.
He then returned to poetry, reading a beautiful piece about reading to his daughter before bed for the last time “because the thing about these moments is that you never know that they’re the last time until after.”
He also spoke about his habit of waking up in the middle of the night to write, inspired by dreams and writing from the ‘night mind.’ By this he meant not bringing too much of the critical, rational mind to bear down on the process of writing, to avoid letting it get in the way.
This is perhaps not surprising given that his collection, The Ecstasy of Skeptics (1994) focused very much on the Nietzschean themes of the relationship between the Apollonian and Dionysian in the artistic process made famous in the German philosopher’s work, The Birth Of Tragedy.
The majority of the discussion focused on the creative process and technique, which personally, I always find to be the most interesting parts of these discussions.
One of the first questions focused on the short fiction he read, asking why he chose not to define his male characters’ occupation until further on in the text.
Heighten astutely observed that those types of details are best dropped intermittently to allow the reader to immediately engage with the action of the narrative rather than “bogging down” the pace of the text with too many details given all at once (*ahem* looking at you Thomas Hardy).
In the context of poetry he also mentioned that writing from dreams can allow you to generate affects and inspire techniques that would make the poetry “weirder than it otherwise would be, if you sat down and planned it out using a purely rational approach”.
When asked whether or not he had any problems going back and forth between poetry and short fiction, Heighten remarked that, “Poetry, these days, is for me a labour of love. Given the stage of my life and my position, I largely focus on fiction, because fiction pays the bills. As soon as I finish one book I begin working on the next.”
Heighten’s reading was an excellent piece of instruction on ways to approach the craft, while also being spotted with some gorgeous writing.