Toews' novel explores Mexico, Mennonites

 

So,

Miriam Toews doesn’t know how to use Twitter.

The award-winning novelist, whose new book, Irma Voth is being released in April, recently signed on to the social networking site to help promote her work.

But she’s still working out the kinks.

“I’m sort of embarrassed about the whole Twitter thing, because I don’t really know how to use it,” she said with a laugh.

“If I don’t properly respond, it’s just because I’m a Luddite.”

Toews is the author of A Complicated Kindness, a novel about Mennonites in Manitoba that won the Governor General’s Award in 2004.

Her follow-up novel, The Flying Troutmans, won the 2008 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.

Her novels have won her international fame and allowed her the luxury of focusing on her writing. However, the impetus for Voth came when she was working on a different project: she had been cast in the Mexican film, Luz Silenciosa, which translates to Silent Light in English.

The movie was filmed in Northern Mexico by Carlos Reygadas, and went on to win the Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize in 2007.

“I’m certainly not an actor,” said Toews. “Carlos Reygadas only hires non-actors, which is how I got the part.”

Regardless, she was nominated for Best Actress in Mexico’s Ariel Awards.

“I’ve had one other person ask me to do a movie, and I said no,” Toews said. “It was a fun, creative experience and I’m glad I did it, but I basically just took directions. Plus, it’s not as creative of a gig as writing.”

Irma Voth tells the story of a young girl, living in a reclusive Mennonite community in the Sierra Madre Mountains, who marries a Mexican boy and is thrown out of the house by her father.

When a film crew starts to film a movie about her community, her life is disrupted and she ultimately runs away with her younger sister, Aggie.

When asked if she feels like she’s finished writing about Mennonites, Toews laughed.

“I made the mistake of saying that after A Complicated Kindness. I blathered all over the place, all over the world. ‘That’s it! I’m never writing about Mennonites again! Nope, I’m done!’ . . . So now, obviously, I lied.”

Toews said she was surprised and pleased by how the Mennonite community responded to A Complicated Kindness.

“There were all kinds of reactions. Some called me a liberator, others a betrayer,” she said. “But I was really happy that a lot of people got it. I was critical of fundamentalism, not the faith itself.”

Toews said she would characterize herself as a “standard agnostic.”

However, she has had a tumultuous year and has found her worldview shaken.

Less than a year ago, her sister Marj committed suicide, following in the footsteps of her father Melvin, who died in 1998. (Toews’ non-fiction book Swing Low is about her father’s struggle with depression.)

“Not to be self-pitying, but it’s been a cataclysmic year,” she said. “Half my family is gone.”
Toews said continuing to work has been one way she has coped.

“Writing is the one thing I can control,” she said.

Her work is often very autobiographical, and mirrors circumstances in her own life. Though humour is plentiful, she acknowledges human tragedy.

When asked whether she has any advice for new and emerging writers, Toews sighed.

“This is not going to be original, that’s for sure,” she said. “But it would be to write what you know, obviously . . . and to just do it every day. The discipline is so important. You have to stop going out drinking with your friends every night. Just stop.”

Toews is currently slated to tour across Canada and then Europe, before returning to finish in the U.S.

She said she has mixed feelings about touring because it’s a great way to connect with her audience and meet new people, but it’s also exhausting.

“My life is sort of exploding from being private to being public again,” she said.
She is already working on a new book, though it is only at the “notebook stage.”

“I feel like if I talk about it, it will just sound stupid and I’ll lose my nerve,” she said. “So that’s a while off.”