Rachel Schwartzmann: Welcome to Slow Stories. I’m Rachel Schwartzmann. I'm a writer, creator, and the author of Slowing: Discover Wonder, Beauty, and Creativity through Slow Living, coming September 17th from Chronicle Books.
For those of you just tuning in, Slow Stories is a multimedia project that began with this podcast and now includes a newsletter on Substack. There, I write about things like time, creativity, and pace—and on this show, I interview artists, entrepreneurs, and innovators who share slow stories—and big ideas—about living, working, and creating in our digital age.
So before we get into the episode, I wanted to share a really exciting announcement: I've spent the last couple of years writing and revising my first book, Slowing, which is out September 17th of this year with Chronicle Books. That said, it's now available for pre-order anywhere books are sold. And for those of you who don't know, pre-orders are incredibly important for all authors—but especially first-time authors like myself. They signal to bookstores and retailers that there's interest in the book and really lay the foundation for my career as an author, which I'm excited to continue.
All that to say, I'll be sharing much more about Slowing in the coming months, and you can follow Slow Stories on Substack for those updates and follow me [on social media] @rachelschwartzmann. But for now, I'll leave you with this: Slowing caters to many literary sensibilities: essay and memoir, creative wellness, and personal growth. Language and lyricism are front and center, but there is also a practical component. There are various ways you can engage with and experience this book. For that reason, I don't know where exactly you'll find it on the shelf, but I'm confident it will fit somewhere in your home. That's where I wrote it, and that's what it means to me. I can't wait for you to read it!
Now, on to the episode, which begins with an opening story from Jacqueline Suskin, who shares how writing a particular poem helped her reimagine her relationship with pace. Here's more from Jacqueline.
Jacqueline Suskin: I'm Jacqueline Suskin. I'm the author of eight books; they're a mix of poetry and creative guidance, and I'm also an educator. I started my career in 2009 with a project called Poem Store. With Poem Store, I took my typewriter to public spaces, farmer's markets, street fairs, where I'd write spontaneous poetry on demand for people passing by. They'd hear me typing circles around my tiny table and give me subjects to write about. In a minute or less, I'd produce a poem, recite it for them, and they'd pay whatever they want for it. I've written over 40,000 poems for people all around the world this way.
This project helped me embody a direct link to the creative source. I can still slip into the flow and spit out verse after verse that I love. But at some point a few years ago, something shifted for me. My friend and fellow artist, Hallie Bateman, requested a poem from me about slowing down, and this is what I wrote for her:
"Slow"
Remember first that in these bodies
we are simply a matter of cosmic reaction.
Our days in this form may be limited
but we are time itself and infinite.
What we make will take a lifetime.
The sacred process of existence has one request:
try and accept that some masterpieces
develop over an eternity. Our designs
are but minuscule bits that build a pattern.
The Muse lands with urgency, but there's no
need to rush the making—we are the container
which protects the features of our future
and slowing the flood preserves the banks.
What ideas we deliver with our hands
may not be a balance of substance
or beauty, yet with unhurried care
we continue to create the world.
In the process of writing this poem, I recognized that I myself wanted to slow down. My career was successfully built on these rapid-fire connections and creations. But at this point, I realized that I could safely turn down the speed. I wrote the word slow in huge letters above my desk. There is no need to rush. I can revel in the slowness of the process now—shift into a new phase. I'm nearly 40, and I've already created so much. Why not pump the brakes a bit and celebrate it all before it's over?
Rachel Schwartzmann: Thank you so much again to Jacqueline for sharing. You can follow her on social media @jsuskin, at Poetic Purpose on Substack, and order her work anywhere books are sold. Now, here's my conversation with Claudia Dey and Heidi Sopinka.
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The two met as undergrads at McGill University and later at a bush camp, cooking for tree planters—and have lived multiple lives since then. In 2012, they co-founded the conscious fashion brand HORSES, which values beauty, utility, wildness, and endurance. They've also translated their artistic prowess to writing and have crafted incisive, spellbinding novels like Heidi's Utopia and Claudia's Daughter.
From fashion to literature, Claudia and Heidi have truly cultivated lives that prize craft, authenticity, and trust. As Claudia put it during our conversation, "It's kind of a perfect combination of poetry and hard physical work, which is maybe what fashion and friendship are." And in this interview, the duo shared more about balancing their creative pursuits, living and working in Toronto, their relationship with time and pace—and their relationship with each other.
I spoke with the duo on a sleepy afternoon back in February and truly came away warmed and ready to do the work of writing—and—living with intention. Once you hear their slow story, I think you'll feel the same. So without giving too much more away, here's my conversation with Claudia Dey and Heidi Sopinka.
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Claudia Dey: I can begin. I'm Claudia Dey. My middle name is Joy. I was born on the Day of the Dead. I'm a Scorpio. I love spaghetti and I value love and goodness.
Rachel Schwartzmann: All good things.
Heidi Sopinka: I'm Heidi Sopinka. Gosh, I find these categorical things very tricky. I value my aloneness even though I'm sort of surrounded by humans that I love. And I sort of had this strange former life of a lot of activity: flying helicopters, and scuba diving, and traveling around. And now I'm just really enjoying being in a life of the mind more.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Interesting. What caused the switch from that activity to now?
Heidi Sopinka: Probably motherhood—and maybe more like a sense of my own mortality. ... a lot more acutely than I felt when I was younger.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I kind of want to turn the question I just asked on its head and ask you what you two enjoy and value about one another.
Claudia Dey: Claudia Dey: Oh, I'm glad you asked that because I was thinking it's probably easier to describe each other than ourselves. [Claudia and Heidi laugh] I guess, you know, in terms of values in building a life out of values, I would say art making ... I mean, we came together truly in a folklore class and then in a bush camp cooking for tree planters. So it's kind of a perfect combination of poetry and hard physical work, which is maybe what fashion and friendship are. So yeah... How would we describe each other? I guess Heidi has a kind of perfect frequency for me because she's so solitary, and then when she's present, she's so present and works so hard. She's such a true reader, so she's so sensitive to language. So there's a great thrill to that.
I don't know I think too so much of relationships is chemistry. It's just a feeling and so we always had that feeling. When you're young you build yourself in relief to the other person. And so I feel like we did that a lot and now we're in kind of a newer phase of our friendship where the outline of who we are is so sure, yet it continues to be complimentary and evolving.
Heidi Sopinka: So beautifully said. [Laughs] And one thing I would add— because I just want to reciprocate all of those amazing things—is just that to spend time with Claudia is to laugh a lot, to think a lot, but also to laugh a lot, which is not to be underestimated in life. I mean [her] middle name [is] Joy, there you have it! In contrast, of course, Claudia has very deep and dark reserves that are so fascinating, but also this insane frequency of just being alive and funny and awake to everything in the world, which I so love being around.
Rachel Schwartzmann: It sounds so special. Claudia, I want to go back to something you said about the outline of yourselves being, I guess, a little bit more secure or filled. Were there certain moments where one of you was sort of playing catch up and trying to figure out who they were more than the other? How did you navigate those imbalances and those moments?
Claudia Dey: Yeah, that's such an interesting question, and I guess it's a new question for me because I don't know if I'd look at friendship that way.
You know, truthfully, I think we would trade that back and forth. Like we would understand when one of us needed to lead and the other needed just to follow for a while, you know? And I think we really do just pass those roles back and forth.
Heidi Sopinka: It's true, isn't it? And we do that with our work. We pass the [baton], holding the sort of design office while the other person can write. It's sort of an incredibly seamless in that sense.
Claudia Dey: Well, and what Heidi was saying just about her former self and this huge physical life of daring, and then now, that was something we understand in a new way, like with motherhood and with this collective business, how valuable infrastructure is and creating that infrastructure for each other and for our own family lives. And so I think it, too, has its own magic. It might sound kind of boring and responsible and overly practical, but it's actually that Flaubert quote: "Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work." I think Heidi and I have concentrated and worked so hard to configure our lives to allow for that for ourselves—but also for each other.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I mean, I feel like it's a practice, too. Friendship is this fixed thing, and it's constantly breathing.
Claudia Dey: Yeah. I mean, Heidi and I joke that this is our other marriage, and every joke has an aspect or a vein of truth in it. [Heidi Laughs] We're very conscious of that flux Rachel that you're talking about: that aliveness in the relationship—and how it's always in process and in progress.
Heidi Sopinka: Mm-Hmm. Mm-Hmm.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I'm just thinking too about everything you've managed to do together and apart as artists, as mothers. Did the pandemic change your relationship in any unexpected ways? I've been thinking a lot about the before, and that clearer mark between what was and what I'm still trying to figure out is now—kind of adjusting to this new normal. And my relationships certainly are, too.
Claudia Dey: How so?
Rachel Schwartzmann: I think just expectations. I think a lot was revealed about values and how people look at the world and move through it. And I think there were just some stark differences that maybe before were a little bit easier to hide, as well as the pace of how we were. And I think a lot of that is why I'm so drawn to the relationship between pace and living and working.
Claudia Dey: Interesting. I mean, I don't think our relationship changed during the pandemic other than each kind of yearning to be together because the relationship is so daily.
Heidi Sopinka: And we were in sort of an oddly intense work period. I thought, too, because of our business and to sort of pivot to all these different kinds of things that we hadn't had to consider before and all of the logistical constraints that we had sort of had us talking a lot. I feel like, in a way—when I was reading about people baking bread, I was thinking, gosh, I don't feel like there's that much time because we were sort of intensely together on a project trying to navigate together.
Claudia Dey: And I think those deeper questions—that you articulated really beautifully, Rachel—revealed themselves too. I think Heidi and I had kind of tested those so thoroughly because of the endurance of the friendship and the way that it's been expressed in so many different [ways]. Can we even be surprised by each other?
Heidi Sopinka: In that way of morality or something? [Laughs]
Claudia Dey: I'm sort of relieved that we probably can't be.
Heidi Sopinka: I think we can be surprised in other ways—in your book or something, that's thrilling. But I think the larger questions of who Claudia is and how she is and loves as a friend is so solid to me.
Rachel Schwartzmann: It's so beautiful. I think too, just for my own experiences talking about the pandemic, I was also exiting my twenties, which tend to be a pretty tumultuous time. And I'm just thinking about friendship, and love, and relationships a lot more clearly in my thirties. And it's freeing. It's nice. I feel like I can be a little bit more honest than I've been.
Heidi Sopinka: I think every decade has its own mark. It's so different. I find it's not individual birthdays, but a whole decade that I feel like life really shifts each decade. And that's amazing that you've noticed what your thirties are bringing.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, I'm making the work of my life noticing. I mean, I came up in the Girlboss era and was informed by things that had to do with the external, which is really funny because it's in contrast to my nature, which is to be concerned with the little things and beauty. But there was just this constant tension between what I was "supposed to be doing" and what I felt was more natural. And I think that's how I found my way back to writing, finally. And it feels like I've crossed some sort of threshold in the last couple of years, and I'm starting to find people who are more on my wavelength. Yeah, it's nice to hear about such an enduring friendship and partnership, and it gives me hope.
Claudia Dey: Do you think that writing is that kind of perfect marriage of internal and external, like that internal life mixed with acute noticing?
Rachel Schwartzmann: I think so. I think I'm learning how to talk about writing with other people. I'm usually in the camp of asking questions and listening. I'm realizing how much of an exchange it actually is, and that requires a little bit of bravery ... I think I had it, but I wasn't willing to share it.
Heidi Sopinka: Mm-Hmm.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I don't know if you [both] know this, but my first book is coming out later this year.
Claudia Dey: Congratulations.
Heidi Sopinka: Congratulations.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Thanks. I'm definitely learning a lot about publishing... I think something shifted in me where I was able to just, like I said, be honest and really look at things.
Claudia Dey: Make sure you have fun with your book, truly. Have a beautiful time with it. It's really important. It's a moment, and it's fast, and it's intense, and it's magnetic, and it's super outward, and just have fun.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah.
Heidi Sopinka: Yeah. It's great advice. It's so true. You can get nervous and worried and cut off in all of the things, but in the end, it's a celebration of all that time and thinking, and it's, as Claudia said, so short. You just have to remember each time you step on a stage or on a podcast or whatever you're doing to just enjoy it.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I'm definitely getting to that point. I think I'm not as afraid of what people will think about the work. I'm just... I don't know how to describe it. I can't really articulate it, but something good is happening where I'm able to let go of a lot of things.
Heidi Sopinka: I think that's huge. That's huge. You know, if you have that intuitive knowledge that you're standing beside the work and you trust the work and you know the work and that very genuinely is enough, that's exactly the state you want to be in.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, well, I think of it as like the perfect first book [for me]. It's a culmination of everything I had done: interviews, essays, and prompts. I think it's just such a nice time capsule and it's given me the confidence to move forward with other projects.
Heidi Sopinka: Incredible. Congratulations.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, thanks.
Claudia Dey: Beautiful.
Rachel Schwartzmann: But I want to make sure we talk about your incredible books too and all of the incredible work you're putting out. It's crazy to me: You've cultivated such an incredible creative life—with fashion, literature, friendship. And I'm curious to hear about how Toronto fuels that. I've interviewed a few people from Toronto over the years, and there was an interesting sort of throughline coming up in those conversations. They were saying that while there is a sense of creativity and community there, there's also a competitive streak that seems to make it hard for people to find a strong sense of bond or longevity in their relationships. And I don't know if you would agree with that [Laughs] but I'm curious to hear about your version of the city and what it's given to you and your relationship.
Claudia Dey: I'm so relieved I live here. I'm so relieved that I live here and that I'm not navigating or hustling in a larger city.
I think the first word that comes to mind for me about the art scene here is cross-pollination. Your friendships and your influences range from restaurants to musicians to sculptors to painters to videographers—and each other, our writing community. I actually find it a deeply supportive place.
Heidi Sopinka: Mm-Hmm. .It's so true because it's not New York or London or somewhere where you have to potentially make commercial decisions around work that you might not if you didn't have to come up with a really expensive rent or something like that. And then also I feel like the Canadian thing is always useful as a writer because we sort of get eclipsed by our neighbors to the south, so it kind of allows us to be observers, which obviously is helpful in terms of writing.
Rachel Schwartzmann: So interesting. I don't know why people were saying the opposite then. I really want to visit. I've only been to Montreal.
Claudia Dey: Montreal's more romantic. Toronto's more aggressive. Toronto does have a high speed and density. But there is so much that speaks to its value and its magic as a city.
Rachel Schwartzmann: And how is it to build a fashion brand there?
Heidi Sopinka: Challenging. [Laughs] It's hard. Yeah, it's really tough because the resources and the audience are very limited. And well, on the one hand, again, it gives us that place: We have a beautiful studio right in Downtown West. We have a lot of things that would be very hard in other places. ... And in terms of the community, again, it's really like Claudia and I have always sort of designed at a really personal place and it would be nice to have more of a community in that realm, but in another sense it's been fine in terms of what we want to accomplish.
Rachel Schwartzmann: How big is your team?
Claudia Dey: Five [Laughs], including us. Yeah, it's very small. It's very small. We have the flagship and we have our in studio team and then we do all of our production in downtown Toronto. So we do work with very small factories [and] sewers. But yeah, the full-time team is very small.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Would you say then that designing is your day job and writing is more of your impulse or passion?
Claudia Dey: No, they have different weights, I would say. I mean, that's a really perceptively profound question. [Laughs] It depends on the day, and it's important to know that they really do feed each other. I know when I come off a book or come off writing—and Heidi and I have talked about this—there's some relief in the hypervisual, commercial, creative enterprise of fashion and even the administration and bureaucracy of fashion—
Heidi Sopinka: And the collaborative nature too, I would say, after all the solitary [time].
Claudia Dey: Yeah, the sociability with each other.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I think I'm also curious about the [brand's] name, and what HORSES means in the context of your values and day-to-day.
Heidi Sopinka: Basically, we were pushing strollers when Venus was transiting the sun and we were both not writing at that point with small babies, and [we] came up with this notion of collection—actually, it started off as slip dresses that we wanted to make—and within a few blocks we had the name. We'd been reading Patti Smith's memoir, Just Kids, and just all the associations with horses, we'd identified the beauty and utility of wildness, things that we wanted to locate what we were making.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Well, you say that you think fashion's autobiography, it seems like so much of it is informed by the things you're reading and who you're becoming—
Heidi Sopinka: And your emotions.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah.
Heidi Sopinka: Who you want to be that day.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Do you ever think of it as fiction too? A form of escape?
Heidi Sopinka: When the pandemic hit, and we sort of realized the implications for our business, we kind of wondered: Do people even want clothes right now? Do we even [want them]? What would we make? You know? And then it was so surprising to us to kind of understand that clothing isn't just clothing, it's not just garments, it's fantasy. It's sort of a glimmer of something: of a future or an event or a feeling in a way that we hadn't totally seen its full scope until people were buying things, even though no one had anywhere to go. It's so profound. It's more than just something covering your body. It's so imbued with so much.
Claudia Dey: Yeah, and I guess too in isolation [of the pandemic] ...now, of course, we use fashion to tell other people how to look and think about us, but in the pandemic, we saw that it was essential for people to be doing that, even just for themselves. So they needed the fiction even about themselves, for themselves.
Rachel Schwartzmann: And I'm sure that working on HORSES has probably impacted how you think about your characters, how you see them, and bringing the tactile elements of their worlds to life.
Heidi Sopinka: Yeah, I mean, dressing is a really quick kind of lightning rod to someone's personality. It's the cheap, fast way to get there and how their exterior looks, I guess. But it does because we've had to think so much about design and choices in that way. It's inevitable that it does sort of show up in terms of creating character, for sure.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Well, I think on the note of characters and talking a little bit more about your books, maybe we can shift the conversation a little bit towards Utopia and Daughter and reading and writing, and first have you read a small section of one of your novels? Maybe we can start with Heidi and Utopia.
Heidi Sopinka: Okay, so I'm going to start with a notebook entry, which the book is made of. It's by Paz, but she discovered the notebook of her husband's ex-wife in 1976.
PASSAGE READ BY HEIDI SOPINKA ︎ PURCHASE UTOPIA︎︎︎
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Rachel Schwartzmann: I really, really loved your exploration of light. It's something that I love and am interested in as well. And I say that because I mentioned something like this in my interview with Kayla Maiuri a couple of years ago, but I often associate books with the time of day. Claudia Dey and Heidi Sopinka: Ooh.
Rachel Schwartzmann: And then, reading your works, I also found myself thinking more of light and space. And so, for me, Utopia is very much in the sky—I'm on the ceiling or in the stars watching Paz search and Romy fall. And you know, Heidi, you also write, "There were a few moments of silence, and then Paz said, 'I want to bridge the material and immaterial.' She wasn't sure why she said it. It just came out. They drove for a while through all that sky. They didn't talk much. They didn't need to. It felt like something had just happened.
And then, in contrast, Daughter, for me, was very much on the ground—I'm in the room holding my breath as these family interactions unfurl. Claudia writes, "When we got home, we had bouquets of flowers rotting through the apartment. There was an underwater smell, the smell of a swamp. I had to move very slowly while my blood did the work of regenerating itself." And so, all of that to say, I'd love to hear about your respective relationships with time and space. What draws you forward in your writing—people or places?
Claudia Dey: Such a big question. [Laughs] Oh my gosh, cosmic considerations... Thank goodness this is Slow Stories because I couldn't process it any faster.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I know, it's a lot to unpack—probably like three questions in one—but your work is so atmospheric in such different ways.
Claudia Dey: Yeah, they give me such a charge. Heidi, hearing Utopia again, it's so smart and sultry ... the frequency of consciousness, too, how rapidly her thoughts change both for and then against yourself.
Heidi Sopinka: For me, the desert and the sky and light... I really was looking at time in such a different way with this book because I have this love of the desert and how sort of deep time ... the collapsing of the notion of time—like nothing is ever truly passed, but everything is already over, and it's sort of an endless sort of place.
And then, on the other side, I was interested in the stories in conversation with a ghost, which kind of relates to that because, you know, on one side, there's the undead, and on the other side, there's the dead. But it's sort of like everything we do and everything we say and every conversation we ever have contains all of it—everyone you've ever loved and every book you've ever read. I think that just moves back into time. I was really deep into the notion of it not being a straight line.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah... I think that's the thing I've been learning we were talking about earlier in the conversation, which is the thing that I have been trying to articulate. It's just this understanding that it's all cyclical, and I'd been so forced or focused to move very linear.
Heidi Sopinka: Yeah. I remember reading—or I can't remember who said this—but the patriarchy's pattern is linear, and the matriarchy is a matrix—a web. I obviously very much identify with the matrix matriarchy notion of everything kind of being related. And I said to a friend of mine when we were talking about the book when I was in an early stage, and I just sort of blurted out like, "Everything is a ghost story." Like everything is a ghost, you know? And it sort of relates to that notion that it's way more cyclical than we sometimes give it credit for.
Rachel Schwartzmann: And then Claudia, what about you? How do you think about time and space?
Claudia Dey: I don't think I can give you a real answer honestly. I think I write from a place that's obsessive that I can't really name. And I think you identified something with this book particularly, which is that I wanted the underground and darkness and confinement and then finding the opposite of that.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Mm-Hmm.
Claudia Dey: But I feel like if I try to give you an answer, it might not be entirely true. I can make it a process-based answer. I do a lot of writing that is searching—writing that I can't stand in order to get to writing that is real. And I know when that real writing is real, I just stay with that. And then I tend to write very, very quickly once I've hit that. And it's sort of the feeling of like transmissions.
Heidi Sopinka: Yeah, I think you're out of time in that state, aren't you? You're just in that state or frequency that you found.
Claudia Dey: Mm-Hmm.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Well, I think in other interviews you've mentioned that you're a physical writer—you have your studio and a burrow almost.
Claudia Dey: Yeah. It's very monkish.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Well, it's interesting just to think about the characters you've created in these books and their anxieties and fears— and to watch those play out in really compelling but also destructive ways. Something I've been thinking about in life and in art is anxiety. It's very pervasive in my world at the moment. And if it's not too personal of a question, I'm curious if either of you navigates anxiety because I feel like a lot of creative people do, and obviously, to be a human is to be anxious, especially in this day and age.
Claudia Dey: Yeah, I'm amazing at anxiety. I mean, it has its own generative qualities ... I keep thinking these days about how if you have a facility for writing, that's a great thing, but your book won't count for anything unless you're in like a very specific kind of pressurized state when you're writing it—or at least my favorite books are like. You can hear in Heidi's book in the excerpt she read—that's a very electrifying, visceral passage. It's the kind of book that gets into your cells, you know? I don't want to read anything engineered or manufactured. Who knows, maybe that changes over time. I'm very interested in that pressurized state, and I don't think it's totally separate from anxiety.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Some people are really good at compartmentalizing, but I'm not.
Claudia Dey: Yeah, I'm not. I have no interest. Psychopaths can do that.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Well, it's interesting because performance and compartmentalization play out in both Utopia and Daughter in some ways. Your characters grapple with fame versus being understood and being seen. And so, I'm wondering if writing their stories changed your understanding of what it means to be seen or understood.
Claudia Dey: Yeah, I can answer. Personally, I think it did for me for sure, and I certainly write to gain a new understanding—in order to understand something that's new.
I did write the story of a young person who basically creates the outlines of personhood through artistic expression, and that was definitely a concurrent thing for me in my own life. I mean, I think that that's part of the gift of writing is that new insight.
Heidi Sopinka: Yeah, I mean I think too, just in a character sense of my book and the sort of subject matter of performance art women in the seventies, it also came from a place of having studied art history at university and realizing that I just learned a lot about the work that men made—otherwise known as the canon. And just understanding just how little our stories that we may tell as women have not ... we've not inherited them ourselves, so we have to kind of make them—in that way we did. That's where our projects overlap and unmaking the patriarchal canon.
Claudia Dey: Mm-Hmm. Mm-Hmm.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yes.
Heidi Sopinka: Hell yes! [Laughs]
Rachel Schwartzmann: Well, I think too, on that note, I love—or appreciated—your explorations of power and also of grief that comes around not being able to harness that power in certain ways or to struggle against it. And this is a question I've actually come to ask a lot of authors, which is really interesting. So, I'm curious to get your take. How do you think writing about power is the same as writing about grief?
Claudia Dey: I wish I could write to you ... that's how I understand, that's how I translate everything by writing it.
I mean, intuitively and immediately, I would say that they're both intense states that change your position in your life—and how you're perceived by others, and by yourself completely. It rescripts your social interface. And I definitely don't think that power is the opposite of grief. I actually think grief is kind of underestimated. I do know that grief is underestimated as its own power. You think that it allows a person entry into another dimension, which a really good part can be created, whereas power, to me, is extremely uninteresting.
Heidi Sopinka: Yeah. I agree. I really feel that exact feeling. I'm so much more interested in what people are making at the margins—how disempowered people, in my opinion, make better art because it's just the vantage point. It's just so much more nuanced, I think.
Claudia Dey: Well, and it's the service of something bigger. I think, too, that power is like its own kind of set of external measurements, and if you're going try to create art from that place or for the hunger for that place, it just will never be interesting.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I don't know if this is too abstract of a question, but I'll try to ask it: just in the vein of what I like to explore with Slow Stories—our relationship with pace and with slowness—I wonder if there's a relationship with pace and power, or pace and grief and how we think about those things. Yeah, sorry, that's a little half-baked. I might have to come back to that. [Laughs]
Claudia Dey: No, I definitely am into engaging abstract thinking. I guess what came to mind immediately was how much pace changes over the course of a project. For me, it begins with this unstoppable manic sprint. And by the end, I'm literally just sitting in a room with the pages, which couldn't be slower because nothing is happening.
Heidi Sopinka: Yeah, no, it's action of the mind and on the page with all of what you've already done. I think it's so interesting, too, because that whole process you just described—I mean, it's set against the context of our ever-increasingly fast-forwarded world. You know, I feel like writing is so separate from that. As you noted, you have to dictate that pace and how that works for you. I feel increasingly it's so much harder because everything is just so sped up, and that's it's tied to capitalism and power.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Would you say that your relationships with pace has changed over the years in like noticeable ways?
Claudia Dey: It's something we're definitely trying to change. [Laughs] We want to move more slowly because we have been in a sprint since we started the business with young children and then wanting the design studio to be a dynamic studio so that we could practice in more than one form. And so doing this thing of like collaborating very intensely in those periods where we're both on and then one of us like holding the architecture while the other one is off writing and doing that for each other has meant just on a very practical level that we don't really have enough unaccounted for moments. In a way, it's really served us because I do think—and you can hear it in the prose—both of us have books that operate at a gallop, and that's founded in the structure of our lives. But we're trying to find a way to truly carve out more time.
Rachel Schwartzmann: So would you say it's hard for you both to be in the present because you're kind of navigating all these moving parts? I'm sure that with motherhood, there is an element of almost revisiting the past when you're feeling nostalgic, but also considering the future and how your kids are going to grow up.
Heidi Sopinka: I think nothing sets you more in the present than motherhood.
Claudia Dey: Yeah. It literally pins you in place, right?
Heidi Sopinka: Mm-Hmm.
Claudia Dey: It's all kind of like present beauty and need. It's not that the challenge is being in the present because I also think that's another place where Heidi and I... despite the immense love of this friendship, there's a formality to it. We respect each other. So when we're together, it's not like we're checking our phones or distracted in any way. We're serious people. When it comes down to being at work when you're at work. I would say it's more just trying to find that unscripted time, where you're not being called upon for something, you're not responsible for something, you're not steering something, where you're just a little bit hidden where you've dropped out of society even for an hour.
Heidi Sopinka: Where you can be alone with your own thoughts or stare at the wall or just be bored—because we have so little [time] around us to even allow for that anymore.
Claudia Dey: Yeah. We're constantly useful and advancing and contributing. Those times that are unscripted, it's like, oh, and this is the opportunity to make art. But as we know it, it doesn't happen that way.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Or it's happening, you don't even realize it's happening.
Claudia Dey: Yeah, exactly. It's much less quantifiable.
Rachel Schwartzmann: So, do you remember the last time that you were bored—or the last part of your life where boredom felt more palpable than it maybe does now?
Claudia Dey: Well, I don't even know if I've ever been bored, but I do remember what it was like to not have a cell phone and to not have the internet, which is when I'm writing—those are part of the conditions that I create for myself. And I know Heidi's the same: just kind of dropping out of that digital life, which has that casino frequency—the bright lights and the self-scrutiny and whether you're a winner or a loser, looking at all of these random things with like no scale. You remember what it's like. And again, I recreate that for myself, and honestly, if I could drop out of that world, I would. My life is glued to it.
Heidi Sopinka: It's so true. And it's so antithetical to long thinking, the thinking that you need to write, really.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I know that kind of goes back to what I was saying earlier: the publishing machine and the author platforms and the things detached from the actual work, but still fuel distraction and sometimes motivation at the worst point.
Claudia Dey: It's so important to have a private life and a private mind because you need to be in conversation with yourself.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Absolutely. I think on that note, to do that you really need to be asking questions and considering things. Zooming out a little bit beyond the private life, is there a question that you hope people start asking you more often? Whether it's about art, friendship, creativity.
Claudia Dey: I don't know. I mean, I know for myself it's a question about where I place my body. I think that would be my question: where are you placing your body, and is it the right place?
Heidi Sopinka: That's a really good question.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Heidi, what about you? Anything?
Heidi Sopinka: Yeah, I mean I think it's just as I get older, I really am so aware of—I mean, this sounds crass—but making time count. So, I guess it's the same sort of notion that Claudia just brought up. What is it that is important? What do I want to do? How do I get closer to myself?
Rachel Schwartzmann: That's a lifelong question.
Claudia Dey and Heidi Sopinka: Mm-Hmm.
Rachel Schwartzmann: And is there a question you want to ask one another that maybe you haven't had the opportunity to—or the time?
Claudia Dey: I don't know why this just came into my head, but I was thinking: What's your best memory of our friendship?
I was thinking about being in the back of a cab together, and the sun was coming up, and we'd been out all night, and we were calling it the Teenage Renaissance. We were laughing so hard. We do laugh so much!
It's almost like a vanity question. It's not a deep question. It's more like: What floats to the surface immediately when you think about us?
Heidi Sopinka: Gosh, I mean, that's a perfect snapshot right there. I think of so many. I feel like the way... I don't know why this is really weird because it seems slightly more about me, [Laughs] but when I met the person that's now my husband, I remember telling you about him, and I remember you grabbed my hand and pulled me down and we sat on the sidewalk in the middle of like a busy moment in the city. And I remember just like that's you. You mark things, which I so appreciate.
Rachel Schwartzmann: That's amazing. I feel like we're just scratching the surface of so many incredible scenes here. I mean, obviously, I think there's so much more we could discuss. I've so enjoyed getting to talk to you about all the things you're doing together and separately and putting out into the world. But maybe to close things out, Claudia, we could have you read from Daughter.
PASSAGE READ BY CLAUDIA DEY ︎ PURCHASE DAUGHTER︎︎︎
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Rachel Schwartzmann: That was my conversation with Claudia Dey and Heidi Sopinka. You can purchase their novels anywhere books are sold—though we recommend supporting local and independent bookstores if you can. You can also check out their fashion brand HORSES on social @horsesatelier and follow Claudia and Heidi, respectively, @claudiadeytona and @heidisopinka. I'm Rachel Schwartzmann, and you've been listening to Slow Stories. Thank you so much for tuning in.