Prompts from Miriam Toews’ writing.
I’m working on a YA novel about a teen trapped in a patriarchal cult. I’ve been a bit sidetracked recently by my real life. That real life has brought me to write short works of creative nonfiction. I think that side path is coming to a close in the next few weeks. In order to get back in the mindset of patriarchy and cults, I have been reading work by Miriam Toews. She was raised in a Mennonite community in Canada. Her work reflects her experience. She consistently considers authority and autonomy from many angles. Who has the right to make life decisions? Do we even have authority over our own lives and deaths?
I recently read some commentary on Toews’ work. This led me to read A Complicated Kindness, All My Puny Sorrows, and Women Talking. These are all wonderful books that I recommend. If you are like I was a few weeks back, and have never read any of Towes’ work, I recommend starting with All My Puny Sorrows. If you are looking for fiction based on a true story, one which highlights how bad a patriarchal society can be for women, start with Women Talking.
The links above lead to some good discussion of these books. My purpose here is only to share some great quotations from the three novels that are fun to read, but are also great writing prompts. Happy creative flow to you!
From “All My Puny Sorrows”
East Village had originated as a godly refuge from the vices of the world but somehow these two, religion and commerce, had become inextricably linked and the wealthier the inhabitants of East Village became the more pious they also became as religious devotion was believed to be rewarded with the growth of business and the accumulation of money, and the accumulation of money was believed to be blessed by God . . .
And besides, my father was thought to be an anomaly in East Village, an oddball, a quiet, depressive, studious guy who went for ten-mile walks in the countryside and believed that reading and writing and reason were the tickets to paradise.
Public enemy number one for these men was a girl with a book.
Then Elf tells me that she has a glass piano inside her. She’s terrified that it will break. She can’t let it break.
I willed my hands to stop trembling and ruffled my hair a bit and prayed to a God I only half believed in. Why are we always told that God will answer our prayers if we believe in Him? Why can’t He ever make the first move?
I didn’t know how to answer the questions I was being asked, questions like: Have you been blessed with the musical gene? What is it like being sister to a prodigy?
Never explain, never retract, never apologize. Just get the thing done and let them howl.
Yoli, she said, I’m just saying that apologies aren’t the bedrock of civilized society. All right! I agree. But what is the bedrock of civilized society? Libraries, said Elf.
Beyond all doubt, if you are not as happy as it is possible to be, you are more beloved than anyone who has ever lived, Y. (That what Madame de Stael wrote at the end of a letter to some Chevalier guy, but now it’s what I’ve written to my Elfrieda.)
. . .the little kid somehow managed to take the lid off the urn. We all watched, open-mouthed, as he started to sift through the ashes of Tina and then fling them around up there, having a heyday playing with his great-grandma’s remains . . .. I learned another thing, which is that just because someone is eating the ashes of your protagonist doesn’t mean you stop telling the story.
From “Women Talking”
In England, where I learned how to read and write, I spelled my name with rocks in a large green field so that God would find me quickly and my punishment would be complete.
She would have told me that I wasn’t normal—that Iwas innocent, yes, but that I had an unusually deep need to be forgiven, even though I had done nothing wrong. Most of us, she said, absolve ourselves of responsibility for change by sentimentalizing our pasts. And then we live freely, happily, or if not altogether happily, without tremendous anguish.
So you believe that maintaining the condition of your own soul is more important than obeying God? Mariche says, less calm now. They are the same thing, really, Ona says, steadily.
It is so narrow and the gullies on either side of the road are so deep. It was only when she learned to focus her gaze far ahead of her, down the road, and not on the road immediately in front of her team that she felt safe.
And don’t we dream of heaven? Isn’t heaven entirely a dreamt thing? Although that doesn’t make it unreal.
We are wasting time, pleads Greta, by passing this burden, this sack of stones, from one to the next, by pushing our pain away. We mustn’t do this. We mustn’t play Hot Potato with our pain, Let’s absorb it ourselves, each of us, she says. Let’s inhale it, let’s digest it, let’s process it into fuel.
From “A Complicated Kindness”
Mr. Quirking has told me that essays and stories generally come, organically, to a preordained ending that is quite out of the writer’s control.
We are supposed to be cheerfully yearning for death and in the meantime, until the blessed day, our lives are meant to be facsimiles of death or at least the dying process.
Sometimes I’d say stuff one day and the next time I saw her she’d refer to it and ask me if I was still feeling the same way or if things had changed. Nobody our age did that. We talked about the stuff that was going on, the things we did, not the way we felt. But Lids had no real action in her life, only feelings and thoughts. She lived in her head and that’s why it glowed.
My friendship with Lids was often about protection. Or it was a shared desperation.Or it was about recognizing the familiar flickering embers of each other’s dying souls.
You know how some people, I’m not sure which people, say that something that happens on one part of the planet can make something else happen on another part of the planet? Usually, I think, they mean some kind of geological event, but I’m sure that my mother’s silent raging against the simplisticness of this town and her church could produce avalanches, typhoons and earthquakes all over the world.
He’s in love with the notion of shame and he traffics the shit like a schoolground pusher, spreading it around but never personally using.
This town is like a movie set. Nothing real is allowed to happen. It’s a ghost town. It’s Brigadoon.
I learned that radioactive elements are by nature unstable and that they lose mass over time because of the emissions from their nuclei. But who cares? I’d ask my dad. Well, he’d answer, holding his chin between his thumb and index finger. These radioactive elements decay in order to become more stable. I rather like that, he’d say.
It may have been the light at 5:36 on a June evening ot it may have been the smell of dust combined with sprinkler water or the sound of the neighbour kid screaming I’ll kill you but suddenly it was like I was dying, the way I missed her. Like I was swooning, like I was going to fall over and pass out. It was like being shot in the back. It was such a surprise, but not a very good one. And then it went away. The way it does. But it exhausted me, like a seizure.
But it could come to that, right? I asked her. That Tash would go to hell? That she’d be right there in the middle of hell, all alone and burning to death forever while Satan laughed and God cried and we were all in heaven together without her?
I can’t remember why he was excommunicated and I never asked. Maybe he took the fall for someone in his family. That happens.
She told me Tash had stopped believing in God. No, I whispered. Yes, said my mom. I couldn’t fathom it. I didn’t get it. That fucking library card, man.
It’s hard to grieve in a town where everything that happens is God’s will. It’s hard to know what to do with your emptiness when you’re not supposed to have emptiness.
David Stone
I’ll have to check out one of her books this summer!