This past spring, Pasha Malla released his first book, The Withdrawal Method , a collection of stories that is high on my list of 2008 favourites. In addition to his short fiction (and, as you’ll read below, his upcoming long-form fiction), Malla’s also a humour writer, and as his piece in our September issue shows, a particularly good one. Recently, I asked Pasha about his book, his ha-has, and his upcoming projects.
A lot of the work you’ve done—like your Imaginings in our September issue and your pieces for McSweeney’s —is humour writing. How did you start writing humour, and why do you continue?
Well, I think whether or not my Imaginings piece or the McSweeney’s things are "humour" is totally subjective. I wrote them, obviously, trying to be funny, but other people finding my stuff funny—or not—is up to them. That’s the thing about humour: it’s completely individual and subjective, maybe more so than any other form. I can read a poem in a style or about something I don’t care for, but if it’s well-crafted (and I’m in a good mood) I can objectively say, "OK, I don’t like this, but it’s well done." With humour you can only succeed (making people laugh) or fail (not making people laugh). I’m sure some people will read my whisky tasting thing and think it’s just dumb, or boring, or pointless, or whatever—which is OK, because it comes with the territory. But hopefully some people will laugh—and then hopefully they’ll toilet paper the houses of the people who don’t.
Now, I’m being evasive here because I’ve tried several times to answer your question and all I keep doing is making stuff up. I don’t know why I write funny—or what I hope is funny—stuff, or why I continue. Maybe there’s some deep-seated psychological reason involving a childhood Marx Brothers marathon or something, but, mainly, it’s good for me to be working in a few different forms to keep sitting at my computer for hours on end interesting. Also I really admire great humour writing (like this ) because it’s such a challenge—finding a conceit that’s fresh, maintaining the right voice, timing, etc.—and I like a challenge, as long as it doesn’t involve a pit full of giant centipedes or wearing any sort of harness.
What’s the difference, for you, between working on a piece of fiction and a piece of humour writing?
Well, often with humour stuff I find that my first go at something ends up being better than what I get doing multiple drafts. If I tinker with a piece as I might a short story (which I’ll often tinker with for years), the comedy tends to lose its freshness. At the same time, writing humour has made me appreciate the need to let things flow naturally, let the story take me along—but always question my instincts. That’s to avoid complacency and predictability, and it’s also a good way to ensure the story—like a joke—is going to surprise a reader. Ideally a story will surprise me while I’m writing it, and end up going places I’d never expected. Also, I don’t want to divorce humour writing from fiction too much; the best books, in my opinion, are always informed by a sense of humour—even if they’re not primarily thought of as funny books. Flannery O’Connor describes Wise Blood as a "comic novel," for example. She’s obviously not a comedy writer, but her writing has a certain dark whimsy to it that makes it accessible, even charming—and probably makes the darkness a bit more palatable, too. A lot of great writers who aren’t considered comedy writers are really funny: Dickens is funny; Dostoevsky is funny; Melville is even funny. You’d never hear anyone say, "You gotta read Moby Dick, it’s hilarious," but that underlying sense of humour, for me, is what really humanizes the story. Life is funny, even when you’re stuck on board a whaling ship with a sociopathic madman, and it’s imperative, I think, to reflect that in fiction.
Your debut collection of stories, The Withdrawal Method , covers a lot of ground, from Canadian kids holed up on a snow day to Pablo Picasso and Jacques Cousteau. How did these stories that are often so different come together for you? Does the collection have what one might think of as a governing principle?
Basically I wrote a whole whack of stories and other short pieces— about thirty—and after the manuscript started getting rejected by publishers (and rightly so), I had to sit down and think: OK, is there a book in here? And that’s really what I wanted to do: not just assemble a bunch of unrelated stories together, but write a BOOK. Lynn Henry at Anansi really helped me throw the weakest and least cohesive stories out. I looked at what was left and tried to figure out what those stories had in common and how they traced some sort of arc (narratively, thematically, and personally), and I ended up writing some new stuff to fill in what I felt was still missing. There’s been some resistance, at least in reviews, to the title of the book, but to me it speaks to all of those concerns. I put a lot of thought into what went in, how the stories are arranged and what, collectively, they’re about. I toyed with using an epigraph that might make some of my thematic concerns more explicit, but in the end it seemed a bit too directive—and sort of pretentious. Ultimately, though, whatever reading people take from it, I hope they’ll consider The Withdrawal Method as a BOOK, and not just a bunch of disparate, unconnected stories.
The Booker longlist was just announced. Read any of them yet? If so, care to guess at the winner?
I haven’t read any of the books. I’m embarrassingly behind on my reading—still catching up on twentieth century books I missed out on, and even then it’s mostly stuff from before 1990. But, OK, I’ll go with Netherland , only because it sounded so awesome from James Wood’s review in the New Yorker . He pulled out a line of O’Neill’s about the "garbage of light" of New York City at night that deserves an award itself—I think that’s just beautiful, so perfect. I hope to get to the book before 2030.
And what’s next for you? I know you’re working on a novel—care to talk about it? And poems?
Yeah, I’m working on two novels actually: one’s a YA book and the other is plain old A. It’s nice to have two totally different things going on and to be able to alternate between them. The book of poems I’ve got coming out in the fall with Snare Books was something I wrote concurrently with The Withdrawal Method , and I loved that experience, having two venues for disparate forms, styles and ideas. With the poems it was nice to access a different part of my brain—I wrote a lot of them at four in the morning, when I found I was thinking in completely different ways about different things than I was at, say, four in the afternoon when I was writing the stories.
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