Sheila Heti on Boarding Schools and the Mind of a Writer

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This week’s story, “The St. Alwynn Girls at Sea,” is about a girls’ school that takes to the North Atlantic Ocean aboard a ship during a time of war. When did this premise first come to you? Did it arrive fully formed or start with a single image or episode or character?

I guess it came fully formed. I had a dream last spring about a girls’ school on a ship. I went to a girls’ school in Toronto called St. Clement’s for a good part of my childhood (from grade four until the end of grade nine), and I think I always imagined that one day I might write about a girls’ school. Somehow seeing the school on a ship suddenly made that possible. When I was little, I used to stay home from school, pretending to be sick, and I would draw all the different girls who would be in my future book, giving them different hair colors and naming them, which was the best part. I never had a story, just the girls and their personalities.

The principal of St. Alwynn’s, Madame Ghislaine, came up with the idea, and she persuaded the principal of a boys’ school to follow suit. The schools are on separate ships, but they are supposed to meet at sea once a month. Many of the girls spend much of their time thinking about the boys. Is that inevitable at an all-girls’ school, whether at sea or on land?

I don’t know. Actually, I don’t remember thinking about boys that much. Some of the other girls did, and I found them slightly terrifying and really mature. One of my best friends from my former school went “boy crazy” in sixth grade, and I was really upset about it. Because I didn’t really know any boys my age, boys seemed exotic, far away, unknowable, and kind of beside the point. For me, the romance was among the girls. In my story, their crushes and fantasies are not so much about the boys; they’re like objects the girls can hold on to, and talk about, and share with one another, in order to be in relation to each other in various, intimate ways.

The girls have been preparing for a talent show, but once it’s announced that the boys’ ship can no longer make it, they—and, somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, their headmistress—believe that it is pointless. Why did you decide that Madame Ghislaine would cancel the show?

I don’t know! I probably didn’t feel like writing a talent show.

One of the girls, Dani, has entered into a correspondence with a boy named Sebastien, whom she’d met at a dance. It’s the first time that she’s had a crush on a boy. Did you draw on your own memories when you were thinking about Dani’s feelings? What does the epistolary form give the nascent relationship?

I remember being set up with a boy at a grade-seven dance. He was the shortest boy in his grade, and I was the shortest girl in mine. Our friends were certain we’d be happy to dance together, but he was unhappy and so was I.

I have a friend named Alice who is the same age as the girls in the story, and, around the time I had the dream about the ship, she and I went out for sushi, as we do a few times a year, and she was telling me about her most recent crush. I wrote the story soon after. Memories of the many crushes I’ve had came into it, but her intensity—our dinner conversation was entirely about her crush—really fuelled the story.

As for letters, it’s rare to get them through the mail, though I still do sometimes, and I have a whole suitcase full of them from the nineties, when I regularly corresponded with friends that way. Letters are so special. They contain a whole person. In my story, mail was the only way I could think of for Dani and Sebastien to be in touch.

One girl, Lorraine, has absolutely no interest in the obsession with boys. She watches the nightly news and tries to tell the others what’s happening in the war. She pores over maps—“For her, a map wasn’t a meaningless muddle: it was wars and territories built from men’s passions”—and dreams of being a diplomat. She doesn’t always seem the most diplomatic of characters! But could she hold her own at the negotiating table?

I don’t know. The way Lorraine describes the diplomatic personality doesn’t seem like her at all. But, then, I have no idea what sort of person succeeds at the negotiating table. Maybe she’d be good.

Sebastien already has a girlfriend, someone he’s known since kindergarten. But Dani learns that he’s been writing to another girl on the ship, which upsets her deeply. How introspective is Dani? Does this force her to look more closely at herself and her own sense of morality?

I think it does. Dani isn’t drawn to introspection. She is someone who likes to act, to make things happen, who prefers not to think, because, if she thought, it would get in the way of acting. This may be the first time she’s followed a train of thought to the end. Usually, she’s the one creating everyone’s reality—coming up with the rules and games—so it’s particularly startling and uncomfortable for her to learn that someone else might create a reality, too.

Do you think you’ll write more about St. Alwynn’s and life aboard the ship? Would you go into any more detail about the war?

I might write more. This story was already carved from something longer. When I started writing about these girls last spring, I was imagining it might become a book. Then, when I turned it into a story, it felt like it was done. Then after I was done turning it into a story I started wanting it to be a novel again. Now I’m curious to see whether publishing it will make me feel like the project has ended, or whether it will make me excited to write more.

As for expanding upon the war, I hadn’t imagined going into more detail about it! But I like that idea, even if part of what was fun about writing this story was focussing on the sorts of details that those who like war stories would find trivial and exasperating.