What gives me the right to be here, alive and making art, while they are not?

I've been meaning to ask Sydney Hegele

I’ve been meaning to ask you is an interview series where Kathryn Mockler invites people to answer questions about being human.

What is your first memory of existing?

I have a poem about this exact thing, actually. It’s called “I tell my therapist that memory is a wet wound”, and it was published in my chapbook The Last Thing I Will See Before I Die with 845 Press in 2022.

It isn’t a good memory. I wouldn’t say that the wound is still wet, though. It is healing, slowly. Scabbing over. There are a lot of folks like me–people whose first memories of existence and first memories of violence are the same memories. Meeting some of those other people started that healing process for me.

What is your first memory of being creative (writing, art making, etc.)?

Being five or six years old and filling my pockets with small rocks from around the Forty Mile Creek in Grimsby and drawing faces on them with Sharpie. Then I would sort them into rock families and give each rock doll upsetting-yet-inspiring lore.

What is the best or worst dream you ever had?

This is not exactly answering the question, but I’m obsessed with the phenomenon of “hyper-realistic dreams about people or relationships that don’t actually exist, leaving the dreamers with a profound sense of grief and confusion upon waking”. When I was fifteen, I started regularly having a dream about a baby boy who was not real–a newborn son that I did not have in real life. I still have the dream sometimes now, thirteen years later. The dream is always a little terrifying, because I’m suddenly holding this newborn and I haven’t even been taught how to hold him correctly. I don’t know how to care for him at all. Gradually, as the dream goes on, I get used to having him around. When I wake up, his absence is always kind of shocking, even though I’m immediately aware that what I just experienced was a dream. And there’s grief there–not because I someday want children and don’t have them yet (maybe a bit of that in recent years?) but specifically over this baby, who does not and cannot and will not ever exist as he does in the dream. It feels like taking a nap with something precious in your pocket, and waking up in a different room, to find your pocket empty, and you’re just sort of quietly asking, to no one in particular, “Where did it go? What did I do wrong?”.

Strangely, this is a very commonly shared experience. When someone online makes a video about “the sadness of waking up and not knowing where the baby from your dream has gone”, there are always hundreds of comments saying yes, me too.

I’m sure there is symbolism there. I’m sure there are plenty of connections to be made between this particular dream of mine and my childhood experiences. But I am less interested in the symbolism of it all, and more interested in what it means to feel real grief after losing something in a dream, and why so many of us have experienced it.

Do you have a preferred emotion to experience? What is it and why? Or is there an emotion that you detest having and why?

I think that, for a long time, my favourite emotion was awe. I’m partial to a kind of quiet happiness, these days. Feeling at-peace.

Can you recount a time (that you're willing to share) when you were embarrassed?

In the first three years of my undergrad, I had this terrible habit of writing entire research papers and essays in a single night. This was before I was properly diagnosed and medicated for my aggressive ADHD. If an essay was due to be handed in for an 11am class on a Tuesday, I would start the essay at 10pm on Monday night, stay up all night writing it, edit it quickly from 9am to 10:30am, while sleep-deprived, and send it to the printer to pick up before my class began.

Once, I did this for an English course, and I ended up getting a 96% on the essay (I probably should not have gotten this grade). The embarrassing part was that 4% had been docked because I somehow managed to spell my own first and last name wrong. Both of them.

Honestly, just recounting my undergrad essay all-nighters is making me embarrassed now. Nineteen-year-old me was fearless, I’ll give them that.

What do you cherish most about this world?

That there are still a small handful of places on earth that remain untouched by humans. I hope that they stay unexplored forever. I hope that they outlive me by millions of years.

What would you like to change about this world?

I want Palestine to be free. For the Palestinian people to have lives untouched by Israel’s hatred, cruelty, and desolation. It is humiliating and disgraceful to have to dream up a “utopia” in which the US and Canada are not actively helping Israel burn journalists alive in their tents and murder five-year-old children travelling in ambulances. Israel has killed entire families of multiple generations. They’ve tortured and murdered aid workers. IDF soldiers have arrested innocent Palestinian men and literally sexually assaulted them to death.

What gives me the right to be here, alive and making art, while they are not? My life is not worth more than any of theirs.

What advice would you give to your younger self? Your younger self could be you at any age.

You are not inherently bad. Nothing inside you is rotting or ruined. It was not your fault.

Do you believe in ghosts? Why or why not?

Sort of? I definitely believe that when people commit abominable acts, that hatred and trauma soaks into landscapes and floorboards and children several generations later. I believe in hauntings. I believe in a lot of things that I have never seen.

If you could send your love to anyone, who would it be and why?

My husband, Christian.

Trans kids everywhere, both alive and long gone.

My friend Calvin, who is in Seattle for a conference this week.

I don’t know! All the people who need love. All of them, everywhere. That’s not very practical, but it’s what I want.

Sydney Hegele grew up in the Greenbelt in Southern Ontario. They are the author of Bird Suit (Invisible Publishing, 2024) and The Pump (Invisible Publishing 2021), 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, and EVENT, and have been featured by Lithub, The Poetry Foundation, and Psychology Today. Their essay collection Bad Kids: A Polyphony is forthcoming with Invisible in Fall 2026. They live with their husband and French Bulldog in Tkaronto (Toronto).

Publisher’s Description

A tourist town folk tale of stifled ambition, love, loss, and the bird women who live beneath the lake.

Every summer the peaches ripen in Port Peter, and the tourists arrive to gorge themselves on fruit and sun. They don’t see the bird women, who cavort on the cliffs and live in a meadow beneath the lake. But when summer ends and the visitors go back home, every pregnant Port Peter girl knows what she needs to do: deliver her child to the Birds in a laundry basket on those same lakeside cliffs. But the Birds don’t want Georgia Jackson.

Twenty years on, the peaches are ripening again, the tourists have returned, and Georgia is looking for trouble with any ill-tempered man she can find. When that man turns out to be Arlo Bloom—her mother’s old friend and the new priest in town—she finds herself drawn into a complicated matrix of friendship, grief, faith, sex, and love with Arlo, his wife, Felicity, and their son, Isaiah. Vivid, uncanny, and as likely cursed as touched by grace, their story is a brutal, generous tale as sticky and lush as a Port Peter peach.

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