Q&A with Nadja Lubiw-Hazard: Fiction Heals
The topic of animals in writing is on my mind a lot. My go-to material for free-writing tends to be my drama queen cat Ava, my novel is low-key all about what it is to be a bulldog, and I recently had lots of fun doing a deep dive into chickens in pop culture for Sentient Media (heck yes I’ll share the link!). There’s often a huge disconnect between the reality of animals in the world and the fiction of animals on the page (or the screen), and I believe working to close that gap can yield much more interesting and important work. I’m fascinated by the inherent tension in expressing animal experiences through the strictly human medium of writing. While I’ve by no means mastered authentic animal writing in my own work, I’m excited by all of this unexplored potential. This is partly why I took Ashland Creek Press’s “Writing for Animals” class last year, where I met the incredibly kind and talented writer Nadja Lubiw-Hazard.
Nadja just won the 2021 Siskiyou Prize for Environmental Literature (judged by Deb Olin Unferth) for her short story collection The Life of a Creature. She’s a Toronto-based writer and veterinarian who holds a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine degree from the University of Guelph and a Post Graduate Certificate in Creative Writing from the Humber School for Writers. Her first novel, The Nap-Away Motel, was published in 2019, and her work has also been published in Fiddlehead, Understorey, Canthius, The New Quarterly, and more.
Nadja’s compassionate energy was infectious as she talked with me about her dual love of art and science, a writing career that started in the early years of motherhood (which reminded me of someone else on this blog), and why fiction is her chosen creative space.
Q&A with Nadja Lubiw-Hazard, fiction writer
Q: How did you get started as a writer?
A: I have an eclectic set of interests, and I’m very much split between art and science. When I was in high school, I really loved my English classes, I’ve always loved reading, and I used to write poetry and stories and things like that. But I ended up choosing to study science and I went into veterinary medicine. I didn’t write for a long time—I wrote in journals but I didn’t consider myself a writer and I didn’t take any writing classes. Then in my thirties, I had a baby and I stepped away from working, and suddenly I got really passionate about writing. I wrote this series of essays that were very passionate, though maybe a bit didactic. A lot of them were about animal rights and my experiences in vet school, my experiences as a feminist and as a mother. I wrote these essays—probably 10 or 15 of them—and I put those away. Then I had a second daughter. And in the midst of raising these two kids—they were young, maybe around 1 and 4—I decided to write a novel. I can’t tell you why I did that. Looking back, I’m like, “Where did that even come from?” I didn’t have any writer friends, I wasn’t part of any writing groups, I didn’t have any plans of getting it published. I just started writing and writing and writing. I think, in retrospect, I’d gone through a really difficult time. I’d had three really big losses, one after another after another, and I think it was just my way of working through them through fiction. So, I wrote this giant novel, and then I put that aside. I didn’t want to publish it or think about publishing, but it was an enormous novel—it was 150,000 words. And then I hit a little midlife crisis, and I thought, “What is it that I want to do with the rest of my life? I really want to write. I really want to take that more seriously. I want to get published, I want to be part of writing, I want to explore that part of myself.” That’s when I started taking it seriously, which was about seven years ago.
Q: Your story “Between Breaths” includes a beautiful description of surgery, including the preparations and the ritual of gowning up. How does your experience as a veterinarian impact your writing?
A: I often write about the experiences I had in vet school and as a vet. I have to be honest, I was quite naïve when I went to vet school. I was very passionate about animals, I was already a vegetarian, I was really excited about helping healing animals—and vet school was a big shock. There was so much animal research and so much vivisection in the education, and agriculture’s a big part of vet school so there’s a lot of learning how to manage factory farming and animals being treated as production units. We had a field trip to a slaughterhouse, because vets do a lot of public health. It was really traumatic for me, honestly, so I ended up writing a lot about that. Sometimes subtly and sometimes not so subtly, those stories will weave their way into my writing. In the first novel I wrote, for example, the main character is a veterinarian. I’ve written a couple of short stories where the main character is a veterinarian. And I’ve written a lot of stories where the intersection of my politics and my ideas is sort of simmering there in the story. I’ve found writing fiction is a much better genre for me than nonfiction. I’d like to be a nonfiction writer and I’ve tried, but somehow it’s too forced. But when I write fiction it’s like coming at it slant-wise and I enjoy it so much better. Certainly one of the things that I really enjoyed about vet medicine was problem-solving. You get this animal and this story of what happened and then you have your physical exam of the animal and you’re trying to put together all of these clues and create a narrative that makes sense—like, what’s the diagnosis here? I see a connection to writing there—the idea that you’ve got all this stuff simmering in your subconscious and all these little ideas and sparks for your imagination, and you’re trying to pull that together into a narrative.
Q: What advice do you have for writers who want to incorporate animals into their writing as fully-fleshed-out beings and characters?
A: I’m very interested in how we write about animals and how often we write animal characters that are not really animals—they’re often a substitute for a human character, like a dog that is speaking but is living kind of a human life and is not really a dog. Really know the animal that you’re writing about. Really get into what that animal is like, what matters to that animal, what behaviors that animal does, where that animal lives. Animals are inseparable from the places where they live and that’s an important aspect of being an animal. Instead of thinking of animals as a species, try thinking of them as individuals. Because with any animal species there’s going to be different personalities and different characteristics. Research is really important. Get some books and find out what this animal is like. There’s a really great book about the “umwelt” of an animal, which is an animal’s sensory experience within the place that they live. You can’t create an animal character without knowing how they perceive and interact with their environment. For example, you can’t write a dolphin that just sees and hears—you have to consider echolocation, you have to consider what it’s like to live in the water, as compared to an animal like an earthworm, which is a completely different experience of the world.
Q: It can be hard to write about heavy topics like animal welfare and environmental issues. What challenges do you face writing environmental/animal literature and how do you overcome them?
A: I actually find the writing very therapeutic for managing some of the distress. For example, I read a news story about the dogs that had been abandoned in Chernobyl. I was horrified but also interested in what had happened. People were evacuated and they had to leave their animals behind, and then soldiers came in and shot the animals. When I read this, I was so distressed about it. I tried and tried and tried to write about it. I kept trying to write a nonfiction story. I got started with it, and it was kind of about our relationship with dogs and how humans and dogs have evolved together, and the loyalty between humans and dogs and how that loyalty gets betrayed, and it obviously got betrayed in that situation. I tried to write this, and finally I turned to fiction and I told this story about a woman who was both horrified and unsurprised when she found out about the Chernobyl dogs. It was really helpful for me. It was therapeutic to work through that story using a character and that character’s response to the experience. A lot of my writing actually does that for me, even when I don’t realize. Sometimes I’ll look back on something and be like, “Oh, that was inspired by this thing that happened,” or “Oh, you really were quite upset about that thing even though maybe at the time you sort of brushed it aside” but then it comes out in my writing. It is difficult to engage in these really difficult and devastating things that are happening around us. The number of animals that are killed in factory farming and the suffering they experience… to sort of know that and really accept it and dive into it and realize that this is a terrible system of oppression that we’ve created—to let yourself be there can be really harrowing. So, there is this important managing of allowing myself space to not feel like I have to engage with it all the time, and allowing myself to step back when I need to.
Q: What is your creative process like?
A: I was asked this on a writing panel a couple years ago and I said, “I don’t even have one.” I was embarrassed afterwards and I was like, “Well, that’s ridiculous, obviously you do have some kind of process,” but it felt to me like I didn’t have a process. Part of the reason is that when I started writing, I had these two little kids at home, and I would just snatch five minutes and write write write when I could. People are like, “I have to have my tea just so, and have to have my writing space just so,” and that wasn’t the case for me. I learned to write any time I could find the time. I could write for five minutes, I could write for half an hour, I could leave it and come back like a week later and just jump right in. But after that panel I thought, “You must have some kind of process.” So, I thought about it and I paid attention. And I would say this: I never actually sit down to write without knowing, without having something already simmering. I’ll spend time walking in the woods or riding my bike or grocery shopping, and a lot of time the story’s in my mind and it’s percolating and I’m getting little bits of dialogue or scenes or descriptions of a character. It’s always in my mind. So, when I do sit down to write, I already have something. But I’m not a plotter. I don’t plot things out at all. I get some kind of spark, some kind of idea, and I sit down and I start writing and usually—I don’t know what takes over. It’s so interesting, the creative process. The muse takes over, your subconscious takes over, some part of you that you can’t articulate—it’s not this conscious drive but a little bit of dissociating happens. You just kind of free flow and start writing and you’re like, “Oh, where did she come from?” I’m very open to letting ideas flow and letting things happen. I have a rich imagination and a lot of ideas just plop out that way. I’ll write for a bit, and once I move away from the writing desk, whatever I wrote is now circulating in my mind and that gets my creative juices going. I start to think, “Okay, what’s going to happen next? What did that event signify?” and it goes from there.
Q: What’s your favorite part of the creative process?
A: I love beginnings. I have to be honest, I have many unfinished little projects, because I love that first spark when you get an idea, and in your mind you can picture this beautiful story or poem or creation, and it’s so perfect. And you get started and you’re so excited, and then somewhere along the way it gets harder to write, or you lose some of the thread of where you were going with it, or you realize, “Oh, this was a great idea but I forgot about this aspect of it so how am I going to sort that out?” So, I really love beginnings, and I really love the process of creating—the actual experience of writing. I can really get lost in the flow of it. When I sit down to write the world disappears and I lose sense of time and I lose sense of self. It’s very much one of those experiences where I’m not caught in my ruminating mind in my little self and all my issues and problems and little things. I really get lost in the writing.
You can get in touch with Nadja and read her work at her website.
Nadja recommends reading The View from the Oak: The Private Worlds of Other Creatures to learn more about umwelt, which “stands for organized experience that is not shared by all creatures, but is special to each creature.”
In case you need it, here are a few ways writing heals along with a 15-minute prompt to put it into practice.
Read more Wild Minds posts here.