Author explores anxiety in short story collection

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This article was published 08/11/2019 (2149 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There are all manner of ways of working through the anxieties plaguing our world. For Seyward Goodhand, her process has resulted in a debut collection of short stories, Even That Wildest Hope, published earlier this fall by Invisible Publishing.

The Ontario-raised, Winnipeg-based Goodhand will launch Even That Wildest Hope at 7 p.m. at McNally Robinson Booksellers’ Grant Park location, where she’ll discuss her writing with Ariel Gordon.

Goodhand sees our anxieties as being twofold. “Everything is heating up, something is about to change — whether it’s something catastrophic or some sort of political structural change. It feels like things are heating up to the point that something’s about to break,” she says.

“The other anxiety the stories are tapping into is a feeling of redundancy,” Goodhand continues. “There are so many people, there’s not that many jobs. Machines will take over all the jobs, and people don’t know what to do. ‘How will I survive? What will be there for me on the other side of this?’ There’s this feeling of not mattering, that any of us could very easily slip through the cracks and disappear, and there would be no net.”

In Goodhand’s collection, those anxieties manifest themselves in worlds that are both wonderful and strange, to paraphrase special agent Dale Cooper in David Lynch’s cult hit TV show Twin Peaks. Past, present and future collide in the collection’s 10 stories; some offer a surreal quality while delving into retelling myths, including characters such as Gilgamesh, while others riff on fictionalized accounts of history featuring Leni Riefenstahl, and so on. All of the stories are tied together by a rich language that fleshes out the concepts at the core of the stories.

“I think with short fiction you can be a bit experimental, you can do odd things that over the course of a novel might try people’s patience,” Goodhand explains. “But you can explore an idea really quickly — if some of the stories are inspired by ideas, concepts, moral problems, you can explore them quickly.”

The collection includes a rewriting of her story The Fur Trader’s Daughter, which landed Goodhand a nod on the $10,000 Journey Prize short list in 2011. Goodhand had been working on the stories for years before settling on publishing the collection with Invisible Publishing, based in part on her longstanding friendship with Brian Ibeas, who works for the press.

Goodhand teaches in the University of Winnipeg’s rhetoric, writing and communications department, and is completing her PhD at the University of Toronto on notions of sympathy in early modern England. She was lured to Winnipeg four years ago by her partner, Jason Peters, whom she met at U of T in grad school; Peters also teaches English literature at Booth University College in Winnipeg.

“I’m getting to like it,” Goodhand says of the city. “It’s a really good size — it’s nice that you can run into people you know all the time. I’m from southern Ontario where there are a lot more small towns around… but that feeling of Winnipeg being on the cusp of wilderness is an interesting thing.”

For her next project, Goodhand is looking to stretch out her fiction writing into something longer — a full-length novel. “I’m excited because it’s new… I’m going to have all this space to stretch that I didn’t in the stories,” she explains.

“One of my favourite things about writing is developing a full world, a really idiosyncratic world, and then I get to go to it all the time. I feel sad when the writing is over and I don’t get to go there anymore.”

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