“Our stories go looking for people to write them down”: A Conversation with Cody Caetano

In this interview, novelist Jean Marc Ah-Sen talks with writer and literary agent Cody Caetano about his new memoir ‘Half-Bads in White Regalia.’

Cody Caetano’s debut memoir Half-Bads in White Regalia (Hamish Hamilton) opens with both a challenge and a warning to its readers: “Ask any half-bad to tell you the story about how their bad half came to be and they’ll probably begin with the buckle,” Caetano writes. “The buckle is a rumble that hijacks the interior faculties to make one think and act without compunction. The buckle attacks the locus of focus and apes the half-bad’s best intentions, only to play them like a chump chimp.”

The challenge invites the reader to keep up with Caetano’s spirited, slang-infused prose, the rapturous patter of his ideas. The warning, on the other hand, concerns the many entanglements resulting from half-bad “double consciousness”; of regarding the self through the delusory lens of other (usually dominant) identity groups. Caetano, who is of Anishinaabe and Portuguese descent, explores the many facets of his mixed identity throughout the book, articulating his family’s struggles with self-determination and survival against “Little Miss Dominion,” Caetano’s term for the spectre of settler colonialism haunting Canada’s history and future.

There are many vectors that lead the Caetanos astray from their idyllic beginnings in Happyland, a highway community a few miles east of the township of Severn, Ontario. First there is the aforementioned “buckle,” a kind of surrender to pleasurable or violent impulses, which leads to the “big do, little think”—excessive, short-sighted behavior that pays no heed to its disastrous consequences; and then there is “white regalia,” the deceptive search for prosperity and “newfound confidence” that merely ends in “the snake eyes on loaded dice.” These forces conspire to upend whatever progress the Caetanos make in their respective pursuits, whether it is Cody’s sister Kristine’s burgeoning interest in photography, his mother Mindimooye’s search for answers after discovering her Sixties Scoop birth family, or his father O Touro’s attempts to maintain his sobriety while being employed as an electrical technician.

A graduate of the University of Toronto’s Creative Writing Program and a recipient of the Indigenous Voices Award, Caetano balances his writing with the many responsibilities of being an associate agent at Transatlantic Agency, a prestigious North American literary management firm. I corresponded with Caetano over email to discuss his multidisciplinary approach to agenting, his mentorship under acclaimed writer Lee Maracle, and the “buoyant enthusiasm” that informs his writing. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

*

Jean Marc Ah-Sen: In Half-Bads, you take on the subject position of an observant, vulnerable account taker. Memoirs can sometimes be written in an incontestably authoritative manner that verges on overbearing. How important was it for you to present a narrator that was open to self-discovery and doubt?

Cody Caetano: Lee Maracle once called [my book’s] narrator a convivial badger. And that badger reflects the truth that children do not process their lives the way adults do. A child is overwhelmed by their absorption of the immediate and the velocity at which life moves. The initial drafts of these stories offered a more headstrong and firmer telling. But with time and revision, unfettered precision seemed juvenile and emotionally inauthentic to a child’s beguiled worldview. Narratorial fallibility does not oppose observation but is an acknowledgement that a single witness is outmatched by the varying experiences of an incident, time, or place.

Mary Karr’s teaching of the “subjectivity handshake” frames uncertainty as one of the great promises a memoir can deliver to a reader. I think Mary uses that explicit term in lecture, but The Art of Memoir is an invaluable contemporary resource for memoirists, which I referenced often while writing Half-Bads.

Uncertainty [is] one of the great promises a memoir can deliver to a reader.

JMA: Your parents O Touro and Mindimooye feature prominently in the book, and you excavate family secrets that a less valiant memoirist might have avoided. What instincts did you follow when considering which elements of your family history you would magnify or overlook?

CC: Sometimes people dub memoirists as brave or resilient or raw, but I suspect those comments indicate more about a reader’s subject position than they do anything else. Half-Bads in White Regalia is a polyphonic tale with multigenerational attachments and a vast timeline, and it made sense to incorporate other voices, thoughts, understandings, conclusions, and experiences where I was not present or where I didn’t fully understand what happened if I was to offer further context.

I believe Lee  once said something like, “to know where I’m going, I have to know where I’ve been.” And the buoyant enthusiasm and belief of my loved ones in me revealing where we’ve been is insurmountable. And that might come from their nuanced understandings of the subjectivity handshake. My early years set me up for remembering, and I have a great relationship with memory. So, I naturally harbor a fondness and reverence toward those who inhabit mine.

JMA: Your prose style integrates gamer slang, Anishinaabemowin, and Portuguese. Why was it important for you to graft a poetic register onto a literary form primarily known for being a prosaic one?

CC: The register did not latch onto the memoir but is rather how the memoir arrived. So much of how people come to approach and understand the world is through the linguistic script(s) that [are] learned and rehearsed involuntarily and out of survival. So maybe writing partly comes from the desire to expand on those script(s) of understanding, and the register or diction or colloquial approach is a manifestation of this desire. I don’t know. I do know the language of video games drew me in from an early age, though. A “Needler” and a “Demon Door” ooze such mystery if one hasn’t encountered them in their original contexts, as will a phrase like, “we got Jackals in the courtyard!” But the familiar gamer knows them well.

JMA: Your approach to the memoir is one that understands its potential as a radical text—radical in the sense of aesthetics as much as politics. Do you think that the memoir is a viable medium because of its permutability?

CC: Others may find memoirs exotic, but they helped me discover a love for reading. And my undergraduate instructors who taught me and my peers the principles of writing did so through creative nonfiction, which felt eerily natural and was a site of joy. I loved that, using memories and relationships, a memoirist can augment their experiences of humanity with newfound meaning, especially when capitalism teaches us to erase the past to secure the future.

JMA: The memoir is the first installment in a planned tetralogy. How do you conceive of these four books working together? I’m wondering what ground the second book, The Cancelling of Captain Pleasure Dome, will cover.

CC: At this moment, I see it as an omnibus of nonfiction that exist in the same creative universe, at different but complimentary junctures of a recovery project. I don’t know if they’ll all end up as memoirs or what names they’ll receive, and a lot depends on how the extradiegetic aspects of the next manuscript(s) unfold. But four feels right and it’s fun to plan ahead. The next one will undertake the narrator’s life in his early twenties.

JMA: What was the influence of renowned Indigenous writer Lee Maracle on your work, who was also a mentor figure to you?

CC: I’m still figuring out my answer to this question. But little compares to working with and getting to know Lee. She didn’t hold my hand or give me pages of feedback or marked-up drafts. But she had such effective and personable and singular methodologies for teaching and telling stories. Lee cared deeply about the role and responsibility of a writer, and [she] believed, practiced, and embodied spiritual concatenation and sought to connect the different generations together.

She taught me that we can handle whatever the Creator sends us; that we need 30,000 writers to educate an Indigenous child; that we must feed the world without hating that we’re feeding it, that a bear’s head isn’t that big for no reason; and that our stories go looking for people to write them down.

JMA: Your article in The Walrus regarding whether Indigenous memoir-writing might constitute a kind of “trauma porn” explored how different audiences relate to a body of work. How do you juggle writing that is guided by your motivations as an artist with reception theory and what Hans Robert Jauss called “the horizon of expectations,” both of which largely fall within the domain of the critic? Does your writing seek to collapse the distinction between these two disciplines?

CC: I don’t censor myself for a readership because a writer cannot control how their work is read. But empathy and patience are important qualities. If you’re critical of something, it’s good to approach it with the most possible care, even (especially) if the proponents of it aren’t careful themselves. I don’t know if my writing is capable of collapsing the distinction between critic and artist, or what that means in an existential sense. I can suggest that I’d like that to happen by aspiring to write well, no matter the genre or format, and thereby my work would be valuable for those readers who don’t have literary backgrounds.

If the writer is showing up for their words and the story, that’s all I need to get started.

JMA: You also discussed the concept of “ordained platforming” in the piece—this idea that voices can be celebrated or silenced within a tradition of writing. At what point does a desire to create inclusive spaces in the arts become a fetishization of one type of experience or an objectification of alterity? What is the best way to keep these impulses in check?

CC: Those ends are met once the systems that perpetuate the exclusion create the illusion of inclusivity and puppeteer the world into thinking that back-pats are the best way forward.

I’m not sure I understand what criteria professional artists, who have vested interests in establishing their own position as artists within a tradition and time period and context and community, use to decide who is and/or isn’t the right person to create art or tell stories. Art and storytelling are inextricably linked to imagination and memory and the interior and worldview and those are difficult to quantify or assess objectively, frankly. I absolutely understand when people and communities support artists they feel best represent them and they lean into those artists as representatives. But it is interesting to me when artists themselves determine who is and isn’t the right person “for the job,” because those determining artists are expressing conflicts of interest when they identify as representatives of a collective, in a very authorial way, whether or not they do indeed have that support.

JMA: On top of being a writer, you’re an associate agent at the Transatlantic Agency. How did you start your career as a literary representative? Does your background as a writer inform your approach to accommodating your clients and their needs?

CC: I arrived at Transatlantic in the fall of 2019 to cover my colleague’s maternity leave, and after they returned, I stayed on the admin team. Then, I transitioned more formally to agenting in February 2021, and have begun to slowly build my list since.

When I had the initial offer call with agency president Samantha Haywood, I had an eye to supporting writers beyond reading their works and going to readings. The dynamism my [own writing] trajectory has blessed me with (hopefully) provides fresh ways of thinking about my clients’ questions and concerns and goals. Hopefully. I love pre- and post-acquisition processes, especially working with a writer on their manuscript and supporting them through the timeline, because I have experienced it firsthand. I hope my clients (both current and future) feel comfort and reassurance in knowing that I’m right there with them on the sentence level, whether it’s in their contracts or manuscripts-in-progress, and that they appreciate that level of intimacy. But it is hard to start a business, and I sometimes wonder if I’m a businessperson or someone who loves writers and books. Molly McGhee’s resignation from Tor Books spoke to me, especially as I’ve discovered more about the industry and how cruel it can act toward younger members who don’t come to publishing via cultural nepotism or shmonies.

JMA: What do you look for in a manuscript, and how much do market considerations factor into your decision-making? Are you a proponent of following or guiding where the market is headed?

CC: I’m easy. If the writer is showing up for their words and the story, that’s all I need to get started. I don’t know if I’m as much of a sheep or a shepherd as I am a circuit rider who wants to help clean the water.