Sydney Hegele

Interview with Author Sydney Hegele

The following interview was conducted over Zoom on September 27, 2024 by Courtney Bill, a creative writing student at the University of Victoria.
Author Sydney Hegele standing facing the camera in a bright red coat
Sydney Hegele (they/them) is a queer Anglo-Catholic writer from the Greenbelt in Southern Ontario. They are the author of Bird Suit (Invisible Publishing, 2024) and The Pump (Invisible Publishing, 2021), a short story collection which was the winner of the 2022 ReLit Literary Award for Short Fiction and a finalist for the 2022 Trillium Book Award. Their essays have appeared in Catapult, Electric Literature, EVENT, The Poetry Foundation and Psychology Today. Their essay collection Bad Kids is forthcoming with Invisible in Fall 2025. Sydney’s work often explores small-town queerness, environmental justice, mental illness, religious life, and the complicated relationships between these things. They live with their husband and French Bulldog on Treaty 13 Land (Toronto, Canada).
Buy Bird Suit | Buy The Pump
Equal parts stunning and haunting, Bird Suit is a novel about swollen peaches, a strange tourist town, and the girl at its center. At twenty years old, Georgia Jackson’s life ripens and unroots around her. Newborn babies are left on lakeside cliffs. Bird women sing beneath the lake, if you’re lucky enough to hear their calls.
Book cover for Bird Suit with a large orange bird over a blue seascape setting with white text that reads Bird Suit Sydney Hegele
Courtney Bill: Huge congrats on Bird Suit coming out! It was your debut novel, right? What was your experience like, and how did it feel in comparison to writing short stories? Was it scary?
SH: Yeah, absolutely. I was able to learn how I want to write short stories when I wrote The Pump by reading other short stories that I enjoyed, taking what I needed and leaving what I didn’t. Sheila Heti’s “Mermaid in the Jar,” was one of the first [stories] that I read where I was like, oh, all of these rules that I’ve been told on how to write stories don’t apply to everyone all the time.
Something similar can be said for novel-writing. When it came to writing a novel, I found the most valuable advice was not direct advice from [craft] books that taught me how to write a novel, or structured long-form lessons from specific classes. It was just reading lots of novels. No craft advice or creative writing how-to is one size fits all, necessarily. Especially when we're trying to move across modes and across cultural backgrounds and ways of thinking about narrative outside the white, eurocentric three-act structure.
I rewrote Bird Suit completely probably six or seven times. It took years and years. I had to try a lot of different things and put characters in and take characters out, and in every draft, I got slightly closer.
Your book, even in that first draft, has a natural pacing and a natural direction it wants to go. And rather than trying to make it fit in the mold that you created at the beginning, I find it helpful if I'm really looking for what works and is really compelling by accident. And then I go in and do more of those things on purpose.
CB: When you finished a draft and then rewrote it, would you have a chunk of time where you wouldn’t think about it in between?
SH: Absolutely. For this novel especially, I would go really, really intensely for a few months, and then I would take one or two months completely separated from it. I find that, especially on an editing level, once you’re rereading, and rereading, and rereading sections of your own work, your brain fills in gaps where it wouldn’t, and your brain gets used to the shape and structure of the work. I either get a false sense of what’s going on in it, or I get disheartened by it, and think I shouldn’t even bother editing at all because it’s not good or publishable. When I get either of those reactions, it’s important if you have the ability to step away from it and put it in a drawer.
A lot of teachers say to kill your darlings without explaining that it doesn’t really mean to get rid of everything in your manuscript that you enjoy, or that you really care about—it just means the things that have been in your manuscript for so long that the only reason you’re keeping them there is because they’ve been there since the first draft. Space specifically helps me with those things.
CB: Would you completely rewrite the plot as well?
SH: For Bird Suit, I sort of did, but not for the sake of doing it. It really depends on your strengths and weaknesses as a writer in those first few drafts. I personally find that in my first drafts, I put way too many characters. There is a couple in Bird Suit who have one son, and in the first draft, they had ten children. Every single one of them had names, and every single one of them had lines. I was just so enamored with this idea of having this wild house full of children for them, but I realized all of them were so underdeveloped because there were ten of them.
I find it helpful to have a Word document where I cut and paste lines that don't work. If it's a good enough line, I can usually find some way to put it in a different context. I've called the cut and paste document from my third book “Brain Soup.”
CB: I’m curious what books you read that informed writing Bird Suit.
SH: There’s a poetry book mentioned in Bird Suit called Glass, Irony, and God by Anne Carson. That book informed a lot of the later drafts and has such a prevalent part in the novel still. I was really interested in Southern Gothic sources like Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, plus podcasts like Welcome to Night Vale and TV shows like Twin Peaks. I was really fixated on this idea of small towns as a site of gossip horror because of this layering of perfect, and simplistic, and idyllic over top of the hidden horrors of domestic life.
When I first fell in love with writing, I was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old. I was devouring these massive young adult fantasy and dystopian books and really getting quite a bit out of the way that fan culture works. I was a Tumblr kid, through and through. I was banned from fanfication.com. When I entered university, there was this large narrative shift, like, now that you’re taking writing seriously, these are the kind of books that serious writers read. These are the types of influences that serious writers have. And this quiet pastoral Canadian literature is the kind of thing you’re expected to write—which I don’t think was entirely invaluable because quite a few of those influences I still have.
But coming out of school, I felt disconnected emotionally from what I was writing and reading because I was reading what was deemed to be high art, but I wasn’t engaging in fan culture anymore. When I was able to combine what I’ve read in works [considered] as good writing with aspects of books that I was a fan of, that is when I started writing things that I not only really cared about, but that other people genuinely cared about. I see it as a responsibility of mine to readers to not act like them being a fan isn’t high brow enough for what I'm writing.
To learn to write Bird Suit well, I needed to be emotionally invested in it. And the only way I could do that was to create a book I would have been a fan of if I hadn’t written it.
CB: I saw a tweet the other day that was talking about something similar to this. The Tweeter was like, there's this genre of short fiction that I'm seeing published in literary magazines right now where you're like, oh, this is a good story, but at the same time you feel like the person writing it or editing it—no one really had fun.
SH: Absolutely. It is one of the reasons why when I read The Pump at literary events, I’m almost always reading “Mal Aux Dents (or Toothache)” because I wrote that story when I was learning how to find my fan-nurtured love of characters and stories again. The funny and heartbreaking parts of that story are because of the way that I cared about the characters when I wrote them, and I found that made a big difference in how people perceive the characters.
So usually when I have characters, I will do the kinds of things that I would do if I was just a fan. I’m a big fan of an overwhelming number of hyper specific Spotify playlists for every character or scene. Bird Suit has probably over a hundred private playlists.
I really have to step out of myself as writer and become that fourteen to fifteen-year-old fan again who could not for the life of them just watch a show and not engage with it after. I [would sit] with my friends in our bedrooms twenty-four hours a day creating handwritten top 100 lists of our favourite fictional characters of all time and top 100 of our most hated characters of all time. We would constantly be like, okay, when is this person coming to Fan Expo to sign things? How can we save our paper delivery money to go to Toronto to get a $300 picture with them?
Sometimes we just loved the [characters] because they were funny or really attractive, but underneath that, these characters reflected things on screen that we, being so young and being in a small town, didn’t know how to articulate within ourselves yet. Whether it was queerness, whether it was living below the poverty line, whether it was familial issues or specific types of trauma. Those characters were expressing something I hadn’t even thought to express yet.
CB: There’s a scene in Bird Suit where Georgia and Isaiah are talking, and Georgia says, “you write the kind of book or play or poem you needed when you were that age or in that situation.” I was curious if you think that’s true for you? And if so, what version of yourself do you think this book was written for?
SH: Primarily, I was trying to write a book as a love letter / eulogy to my twenty to twenty-two-year-old self. There’s something about being in your very early twenties where you feel like you hit the epitome of adulthood knowledge, and you really do feel in some ways completely invincible. Like no matter what you could do, you will never die. I was also subversively, and not so subversively, harming myself in a thousand different ways.
I came out of my early twenties feeling bitter and avoidant of that early twenties self, as someone who really thought that they were invincible, but weren’t, and that I'm kind of living through the repercussions of that now.
But as I've gone through writing the book, particularly when it came to Georgia, with every draft I got closer to who Georgia was and why she was the way that she was, which made me care about her a lot more, wanting to protect her and see her flourish rather than blaming her for her actions. But as I was doing that, I was unintentionally doing that for myself as well, and getting closer to—and trying to forgive—that early twenties version of myself.
I had a lot of drafts where nobody who read the book liked Georgia at all because I didn’t enjoy writing her scenes. I was mad about everything she did, even when I was writing what she did. I was allergic and very adverse to writing anything too close to her frame of mind. It made her fall flat and one-dimensional for a few drafts. And when I actually let myself get close enough to think about why she would be doing some of the things she was doing, and how she must have felt about them, that process not only created a better book and more three-dimensional characters, but helped me reconcile some stuff about myself as well.
CB: That’s beautiful. Georgia is so dear to me. I’m glad she has emerged into the character that she is in this current draft.
What would you say is Georgia’s theme song?
SH: She’s named after the song “Georgia” by Phoebe Bridgers. I am not sure if I get into copyright trouble if I admit that.
CB: I love that song so much!
SH: There’s a song by Tomberlin called “Born again Runner.” I had a lot of early Lana Del Rey. Death Cab for Cutie, “You Are a Tourist.” Yeah, a lot of songs like that.
CB: Thank you for indulging me in that.
SH: You are very welcome. I have too much of that information.
I am a ridiculously big fan of private Pinterest boards for the Vibes. I love a good moodboard. Love a good questionnaire of stuff that you may never actually express about your character in the narrative, but it’s fun to personally know: what was their favorite subject in school growing up? What’s their favourite food?
I find it important to be obsessed with the characters I make from a reader perspective rather than a writer because I’m more likely going to put them in situations and take them out of situations in a way that feels well-earned.
Obviously I think that every writer will have a slightly different connection to their book than an individual reader, but it's clear when a character or a relationship seems to leap off the page in a particularly special way. That’s something that I want to spend the rest of my life finding new ways to create for people, over and over again.
Courtney Bill sitting at a bus stop bench wearing a t-shirt with a cat and a ship.
Courtney Bill (she/her) is currently pursuing her BA in creative writing. Her work has appeared in Adroit, PRISM International, The New Quarterly, Canthius, The /tƐmz/ Review, Literary Heist, Frighten the Horses, This Side of West, January Magazine, and elsewhere. Her fiction was a finalist for Adroit’s 2024 Prize for Prose.