Why I Wrote This Book Issue #53: Now I Shall Leave You to Your Fate Takeover Edition!

Hear from the contributors of Now I Shall Leave You To Your Fate about why they wrote their stories in the collection!

Sophie McCreesh, “My Close Friends”

I began writing My Close Friends in 2020 after Jean Marc was kind enough to invite me to be a part of the project. I wanted to deconstruct a neurotic, unreliable narrator’s thought process as she selects people to be part of her close friends list on Instagram. The character’s social anxiety extends to her online activity in an unhealthy way, making the ostensibly simple task of choosing people feel like a referendum on her selfhood. 

Effectively trapped in her apartment and working remotely, her obsession over the list leads her to mentally free-associate in some strange and unexpected ways. She begins to fixate on past events, which leads her to reflect on revenge and forgiveness. What greater model does her idea of truth and beauty derive from? Have the events she vaguely alludes to even transpired? Are these musings just a way to hold on to something that is no longer serving her?

My understanding is that no one cares about your dreams unless they’re in them, but I wrote some dream sequences. They were fun. You will care about them. Maybe you will even see yourself in them. Anyway, that’s what I tried to do.

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Sophie McCreesh’s first novel, Once More, With Feeling, was published in 2021. She lives in Toronto. 

Liz Harmer, “Lighthouse”

I had been struggling with the ethics of writing memoir when I wrote Lighthouse, on the one hand compelled to write about a breakdown and hospitalization that had been formative in my youth and on the other concerned about all the things that plague writers of nonfiction: the problems of memory, the question of other people. As I worked on a large, longterm memoir project, I felt I was trying to find the facts and primary documents of my own life. I tracked down and read through many pages of hospital records. I tried to get in touch with the psychiatrist I’d had then. And I searched for the obituary of one of the other patients I’d known. 

Some distancing from myself happened during this process. How odd it was to read what psychiatrists reported about my behavior right next to the writing I had done about what I had felt like, thought like, at that time. A distancing took place. As I was going through this process during the pandemic lockdown, I began to fictionalize some of this—remove some facts and retain others, to create a character—to find some of that distance from myself.

As I started to fictionalize, I pulled out a poem I’d written about my first apartment at eighteen. I’d moved out while still finishing high school a few months after my release from the hospital. I wrote that I wanted my apartment to be a beacon to everyone I loved. I would have married everyone, I wrote, all these years later, just as my own long marriage was breaking down. And I thought of a thing Virginia Woolf had written about Big Ben in Mrs. Dalloway and, of course, her own lighthouse: that a piece of fiction should have a vertical structure holding it together. I might be misremembering this, but I found it useful all the same. 

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Liz Harmer is novelist, essayist & sometime poet with over 14 years of experience as a writing mentor, teacher, and coach. Passionate about finding joy and making a life in art, she can offer individualized support at all stages of your writing career.

Jean Marc Ah-Sen, “Busybody”

Representations of voyeurism and gazing have always been something of an obsession for me, both in film and in literature. Peeping Tom, Orlando, The Collector, Black Girl, and Blow Up are among my favourite movies, and I feel that the use of the “gaze” in Sciascia’s The Night of the Owl, Clébert’s Paris, Insolite, and Feneon’s Novels In Three Lines were nothing short of revolutionary. 

It is helpful for me to think about every piece of writing I do in terms of what tradition of storytelling it might fit in with, and I thought about how “peeper lit” tends to be built around a meta-awareness of how the act of reading is identical to the peeper’s delight in an unseen vantage point or the sense of illusory power that comes with it. 

I set out with my story “Busybody” to triangulate all these ideas in a situation where a man spies on his roommate at her ex-boyfriend’s behest and then sends the creeping beau detailed reports through a fax machine. The ex-boyfriend experiences heightened pleasure through the mediated documentation of his former flame’s activities with other men, and predictably, the snoop begins to savour the power he holds over his closest intimates.   

Given my aforementioned interest in literary form and history, another idea that I have grappled with as I sit on the cusp of middle age is whether or not there can be “new” contributions to literature. This is not too dissimilar from the idea that took hold a few decades ago that all or most of modern philosophical thought could be considered recapitulations of Hellenistic philosophy or eastern philosophy. It’s a really curious, ethnocentric notion, but then I started entertaining the possibility that maybe there really are no new ideas, and only novel ways of forgetting. 

It was a helpful brainwave because I felt that my meagre contributions to a literary form could somehow be valid if my practice was centered around defamiliarizing popular or familiar themes for a reader: my tawdry little story about spying didn’t just need to be a pale imitation of something someone else wrote, but an extension of that old existentialist saw that the world is new because we are new to the world.   

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Jean Marc Ah-Sen is the author of Grand Menteur, In the Beggarly Style of Imitation, and Kilworthy Tanner. His writing has appeared in Literary Hub, Catapult, The Comics Journal, Hazlitt, Maclean’s, and elsewhere. The National Post has hailed his writing as “an inventive escape from the conventional.”