Heidi Sopinka: On Making Art as a Mother and Business Owner, LA in the 1970s, Writerly Influences and Her Novel, "Utopia"
Heidi Sopinka’s latest novel, Utopia, takes place in the arid locales in and around Los Angeles in the 1970s. It begins with a harrowing scene introducing Romy – a gifted young artist – and the mysterious circumstances surrounding her untimely death. Sopinka’s protagonist, Paz, comes onto the scene not long afterward – fresh out of art school in New York – to take Romy’s place. She marries Romy’s ex-husband and raises Romy’s infant daughter as her own. As the mystery surrounding Romy’s death unravels, we learn about what it was like to be a female artist in the male-dominated art scene at that time and the lengths Paz will go to uncover the truth behind Romy’s disappearance.
I had the pleasure of asking Heidi about how she fits art into her busy life as a mother and business owner, how the landscapes we live affect the narratives of our lives, and her influences as a writer.
In your novel, Utopia, women are so radical! They blow things up and set things on fire. They exist to make art, rather than the other way around. How does this play out in your own life?
I didn’t publish my first novel until I was 45 so I came to writing fiction late in life, though I’d wanted to be a writer since I was a kid. That desire somehow got buried when my confidence was shot as a teenager. And then something happened. When I had my first child, I just started writing what would become my first novel. I suddenly felt an urgency about all those lost years, about making time count. I spent a long time in journalism and working as a magazine editor, so nothing touches writing fiction, it always feels do or die to me. It’s done by the skin-of-my teeth impending disaster which makes the stakes so high, but then the payoff is so much greater. I am conscious of how it requires the precious part of you that otherwise might not get used.
I love how the seventies feminist artists understood that superficial change wasn’t going to make structural change, so they used their own bodies, the very thing that the culture was fearful of and full of contempt for, to confront patriarchy and misogyny. They created newly defined female identities. I also think they were a powerful force as women telling their versions of their own lives before we had really done that culturally—decades before MeToo would open up that conversation publicly. They talked about domestic burden, reproductive rights, rape, menstrual blood, all the messy intimate everyday detail no one wanted to hear about, let alone call art. I had a lot of their works taped above my desk as I wrote and felt so ignited by that thinking.
Your novel centers around the feminist art scene in the late 1970s. How do you feel the landscape for women artists has evolved since then?
I wish I could say that it is so much better now, but we still live in a patriarchy so structurally it’s not that different. Despite all the work the feminists did to make change for us, nothing seems to be able to alter the structures of how art is made, sold, and written about. I have heard of art history courses now being taught, ones that circumnavigate the legacies of men. So, for example, instead of Carl Andre, Jackson Pollock, and Willem De Kooning, the students learn about Ana Mendieta, Lee Krasner, and Elaine de Kooning. When I was at school, I was taught the cannon, which is to say, I learned a lot about the art that white men made. I realize now that we have to determine our artistic lineages ourselves. I think a lot about how there is nowhere to even place a “great” woman artist. Women (and by women, I mean the political category of anyone who has suffered under the material conditions historically assigned to women which includes trans, non-binary, and agender people) have been erased from history. They have been through a lot and their history hasn’t been told. Go to any museum. You won’t see a lot of art by women artists exhibited. We are not even at the point of history yet! This is all being talked about now, but it’s still really grim in terms of the hard statistics, like how little work the big galleries exhibit by women artists, or the fact that art made by men still gets ten times the price than art made by women. It’s mind-blowing. On the flipside of this, I think despite being very essentialist and having massive blind spots, there are some things we can take from the radical 70s feminists to help us navigate the monstrous times of today. They rejected dominant culture’s contempt for women. They forced the viewer into lingering in uncomfortable moments instead of reverting to the status quo. They looked for ways to live without being constantly limited or damaged by the violent reinforcement of ideas about what is possible for the kind of body you happen to inhabit.
Something so central to this plot is the conflict between being a mother and making art. Your protagonist, Paz, struggles with this throughout the narrative, and I could absolutely relate. As a mother and a writer, I feel my opportunity to create is often relegated to the in-between times: those moments after my son goes to sleep and before I do, the hours after I drop him off for school and before I pick him up. I wonder if you can say more about how this comes up for you in your daily life, as a mother and a creative person? How do you find time to fit art into your daily life?
The short answer is— and this is somewhat tragic to admit—I don’t. I know everyone says you have to write a certain amount every day to really work on your craft and I do think writing is a discipline that not only benefits from but requires repetitive longform thinking. But I’ll just be honest here, my time is really limited. I run a design studio with my close friend which has become a big job as the business has really grown. That, alongside three children (currently four as my niece living with us this year) means my house is always busy and chaotic. The one thing I’ve always done, since I was small, is to read in a not normal way. I’ve always devoured books. I feel that if I’m not writing, at least if I’m reading, I am connected to the process of writing. I think I write a lot in my mind— something I learned while parenting small children. Mothering is definitely up there as a five-alarm-panic level of distraction. I have developed a bit of a weird system where I leave my day job, my house, my children, my partner, my giant dog, and find any empty place that someone will give me the keys to, and I check out of my life for a week or two so that I can fully dedicate myself to writing (and I do this a several times over the course of a draft). I get super weird and have so many rules when I go to these places (like I can’t do anything except write, and if I have a really good day, I will allow myself to go on the internet, or watch a movie late at night or read a book). I am superstitious about rituals and routines. The main thing is I get about three times the amount done than if I’d been at home. And that compression forces writing out of me that feels essential to being able to make something out of nothing.
You’ve set Utopia in Los Angeles, and this backdrop functions almost as another character in the book. The rigid and arid landscape, along with the intense heat, seem to trap Paz inside herself and prevent her from feeling free. And the big sky and never-ending sunlight mesmerize Romy and inform her final works. What role does Los Angeles play in your own life? And did this story always take place in Los Angeles, or did this setting come to you as you were writing?
Thank you for noting that LA is a character, that’s exactly how I envisioned it too. I think when I knew I was writing about performance artists and land artists in the 1970s, Southern California seemed essential to the story. So much interesting work was happening out there, Judy Chicago feminizing the landscape with her smoke sculptures. There was the first feminist art history program beginning at CalArts. I was also a bit obsessed with Bas Jan Ader, the LA-based Dutch conceptual artist who disappeared in 1975 while sailing a twelve-and-a-half-foot boat from America to Europe while completing his work, In Search of the Miraculous. The craft was found, nine months later off the coast of Ireland— empty.
I loved having the opportunity to get to write about LA because I’ve always felt both lit up by it and also a bit haunted by it. A friend of mine says it has some kind of sorcery which I think is true. It’s so saturated with dreams, it turns the city almost magical. I once stayed at the Gaylord, the old building in Koreatown that is at the start of the novel and loved how weird it was because it was so grand and elegant but there was also a divey old man bar and insanely high ceilings and cockroaches scuttling as you walked through the halls.
I wanted to write about deserts because I love how they are on the edge of everything. I always feel like I’m staring down deep time when I’m there. I’ve slept out in Death Valley and Joshua Tree and seen the moon rise so bright it felt like a blinding spotlight shining from a movie set. Once when I woke up there, I saw literally hundreds of squiggly prints in the sand of what I realized were snakes that must have been sleeping under my tent all night. I love how the desert holds both beauty and terror at once.
Along the same lines, I’m curious how you feel the settings and landscapes in which we live affect the narratives of our lives?
It’s funny because now that I think about it, both my novels have really been about elsewhere. In The Dictionary of Animal Languages, it was about surrealist Paris and the frozen north. With Utopia it’s 1970s California in a drought, most of which was written during long snowy Canadian winters. So I guess I’m almost escaping the narrative I’m in. I left home as soon as I could, and at seventeen, travelled on trains through Europe and then a few years later backpacked for months through Central America. I also lived on the equator for a couple of years, so I think writing now functions as that same kind of other, a wildly alive place. I like how it takes you elsewhere, out of your day-to-day reality, how it forces an evolution in you.
At one point in the book, Romy tells Paz: “You have to find the value in how making [art] changes you. You can’t let it bother you — what anyone else says.” This sentiment resonates with me on a deep level. It’s something I know to be true, and yet I often struggle to remember in my day-to-day life. What about you? Do you feel you’re living Romy’s words, or is this something you struggle with as well?
No, not at all. Kidding. Yes, it’s something I think about too. A writer friend of mine said that writing literary fiction is kind of like being a classical harp player— beautiful and rarified, so you can’t really be surprised if it doesn’t have an enormous impact on the world. My first novel took me eight years to write because I gave birth two more times during that writing period, and was suddenly caring for three very small children. Like you, I stole time to write when I could, so I felt like no matter what the reception was to the book, the act of writing and publishing a novel felt like a kind of victory. There is so much noise and competition in our extremely online culture, and you can easily identify that it’s a game of what books get talked about and what books have huge money behind them to ensure that they in turn will make big money. But that kind of thinking can sink you. You really do have to be compelled by what you are writing because you have to live and think and work in it for years. It’s truly an insane undertaking but nothing touches the feeling of when it’s going well.
Your novel, Utopia, has echoes of Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier. How did du Maurier influence you as a writer? Who are some of your other influences?
One of my sisters read Rebecca when we were kids— she was this brilliant omnivore reader who would read Dostoevsky at the same time as Jackie Collins, in grade school. I read her copy of Rebecca when I was about twelve. It’s a very strange book. Du Maurier created a really unstable emotional landscape. I didn’t realize it until I was older that the narrator’s full heat of desire was not for her husband, but for Rebecca. This definitely crept into my thinking around Utopia. Rebecca is anti-feminist in the sense that it puts such a fear of a powerful woman firmly at its center, tapping into that primal fear of rival that women have been conditioned to have for each other. It’s also about the turning of a woman’s energies away from herself so that she will focus on a man. In other words, a patriarchal classic.
In terms of other books, I read Zora Neale Hurston’s brilliant, Their Eyes Were Watching God in 9th grade and never forgot it. I have always loved the brain and sentences of Virginia Woolf. I am so compelled by the short stories of Clarice Lispector and in particular her novel, The Hour of The Star— which made me want to write. I felt like I was in dialogue with Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays and Slouching Toward Bethlehem as well as all of Eve Babitz’s books when I was working on Utopia. I also reread a lot of the landmark second-wave feminist books, and in particular was struck by what a prophet Andrea Dworkin— so hated at the time for her overalls and her anger and notion that all sex was rape— turned out to be.
You’ve done such extensive research and have created such a fully rendered world for Utopia! How long did it take you to write this book? What is your writing process like?
Thank you! I wrote this book way faster than my first novel. It probably took over the course of about two years (writing in week-long stints), so maybe several months total, which is fast for me. I had the image of a woman falling and the idea of a love triangle with a ghost while I was finishing my first book, so I was dying to get to writing it. Having the idea helped carry me through the weirdness of the outward-facing part of promoting a book.
I wrote the last section of Utopia first, one night when I was jet-lagged and had insomnia in Edinburgh after an event I did at the literary festival. I stayed up all night in my hotel a bit spooked and started writing. I literally felt like I’d had a visitation. I didn’t know if I’d ever use that writing, but when I finished the 1970s section of the novel a year or so later, I saw how it could work with the story.
Before I go off to write, I am like an animal preparing for winter, madly racing around trying to put things in place so I can leave my life (which is only possible now that my children are not small anymore). When I am alone writing, I put my phone in a drawer and purposefully do not get the Wi-Fi password. I make it really hard to get on the internet. I force myself to sit in a chair so that it is impossible to do anything other than write. It can be hard, excruciating even, to get started at first, but this method somehow makes the writing eventually come for me. Because of the time constraint, I’m forced to work with an almost alarming efficiency—I don’t have a choice. It’s probably terrible advice to anyone to write this way. But somehow this is how I have to work right now. It still always amazes me that you go into a room with nothing and come out with something, and how much that process makes you understand things you didn’t before.
Do you have a new project in the works?
I have a few ideas right now, one of which is really scary to me to think of writing so I’m almost positive that is the one I’m going to have to start working on.
Heidi Sopinka is the author of The Dictionary of Animal Languages, which was shortlisted for the Kobo Writing Emerging Writer Prize, and longlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize. A former environment columnist at The Globe and Mail, she is co-founder and co-designer at Horses Atelier. Her writing has won a national magazine award and has appeared in The Paris Review, The Believer, Brick, and Lit Hub, and has been anthologized in Art Essays. She lives in Toronto.
About the Interviewer
Erin Russ holds a BA in English Literature from University of Washington and has studied with authors Hope Edelman, Lisa Cron and Dani Shapiro. She believes creativity is a calling and is most comfortable dwelling in the space where life meets art. She recently finished writing a memoir about the two years she spent sailing on the high seas. She lives in Ojai, California.
