Meet the Author: Heidi Reimer

Long-time readers of the newsletter know that I am not a fan of rigid writing advice (like the often dogmatic “write every day” approach). That was just one of the reasons I loved talking with Heidi Reimer about how she wrote her debut novel, The Mother Act (affiliate link*), and her approach to writing.

Heidi blends structure with creative freedom to create a writing life that is uniquely hers—and she works with authors to build their own practices, as well. Read to the end for Heidi’s writing advice!

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​Heidi Reimer is a novelist, a writing coach at Sarah Selecky Writing School, and the author of The Mother Act. Her writing interrogates the lives of women, usually those bent on breaking free of what they’re given to create what they yearn for.

Her front row seat to The Mother Act’s theatrical world began two decades ago when she met and married an actor, and her immersion in motherhood began when she adopted a toddler and discovered she was pregnant on the same day.

Heidi has published in Chatelaine, The New Quarterly, Lit Hub, Literary Mama, and the anthologies The M Word: Conversations About Motherhood and Body & Soul: Stories for Skeptics and Seekers. She is from Northern Ontario, Canada, and currently writes in a small town on the St. Lawrence River.

You can check out Heidi’s coaching and manuscript evaluations, sign up for her newsletter, and follow her on Instagram. Heidi also offers a free four-part email series, The 4 Creativity-Sustaining Principles.

Tell me about your journey to writing The Mother Act.

I guess the whole journey toward becoming a writer started when I was a kid. It was always what I knew I wanted to do.

The Mother Act was not the first book that I had written. It is the first book that I've published. I was actually in the middle of working on a different novel when I got the idea for The Mother Act

That other novel had a mother in it who did not have any voice or point of view. She was somebody's mother, and she was terrible. She was terrible. She'd abandoned her daughter.

She'd been like, “Peace out. Can't handle this, not doing it.” I had very little empathy for her. She wasn't the point of the story.

The story was about her daughter, the wounds that she had inflicted. And then I became a mother.

I was still working on this book, and I was just increasingly identifying with this terrible mother who had essentially found it really hard to give up her liberties, her time, her solitude, her social life, her ability to move freely in the world to attend to the needs of a small human, and she felt she wasn't cut out for it.

I was just like, “I kind of am relating to this.” I really started to want to find ways to bring more nuance to that character. I concluded that there were no ways—it was not her story.

But that is where the idea for The Mother Act came from. It came to me on a pretty challenging day in early motherhood, where I felt like I understood wanting to walk out the door and trying to go back to the person I used to be.

It felt that I was being colonized and overtaken by this role. That is when I had this idea for a new novel that gave equal voice to a mother and a daughter.

The mother does leave early in the daughter's life and she's in and out of her life after that, but she's not present. She prioritizes herself and her own flourishing and her own dreams and her own image. The daughter lives with the fallout of that and has a lot of really justified resentment.

It’s equal from both their perspectives. I didn't want a good guy and a bad guy, although some readers have decided who the bad guy is, and that's fine. I wanted them to have equal space.

The book has a unique non-linear structure with these multiple perspectives. How did that evolve as you were writing?

From the very beginning, almost from that first moment of the idea and in the next half hour as I was like, “Oh, it could be this, and it could be this,” I had that structure: It's the opening night of a play, a one-woman show that the mother is performing.

We start with the daughter arriving at the theater, very reluctantly, to watch her mother's show. She's an adult now. We touch in at intermission, and the end of the book is after the show.

The bulk of the book is their story, the story of their relationship. That's the way I think of it, anyway. It's what's unfolding on the stage. It's what the mother is performing from both their perspectives. She's playing both of them.

I had that concept, but making it work and figuring out what was supposed to be in each of those sections was the hard part. I did not get that correct out of the gate. I had some false starts.

I chucked some long sections, but once I figured out the pieces of the story, I knew what was supposed to go in there. I'm making it sound too easy. It was hard.

I actually abandoned the book at one point, because I thought I'd set myself a task that was not viable. I was concerned that you already know a lot of things going in. We're seeing how they happen and why they happened, not what happens.

You know the mother left, so you're leading toward that moment of her leaving, but you already know what's going to happen. I had to find a way to make that propulsive.

So pulling that off—and I think I did, with the help of my editors, who eventually came on board—was really satisfying.

What does a day look like in your writing practice?

In my ideal life, writing happens first thing. My brain is best then, my focus is best then, and I am fortunate enough now—which has not always been the case by any means—to be mostly in charge of my own schedule.

I work as a writing coach, and I do manuscript evaluations as well. I don't book any calls before noon, unless you really have to. That is a huge, huge value of mine, having control over my time.

Writing first. I really believe in a practice, something not that's rigid and certainly not punishing, but something that you show up to. It's just what you do, whether you feel like it or not.

It was once I started taking that seriously that I really began to get traction in my writing. Earlier in my writing life, I was a lot more like, “I’ll write when I feel like writing.” I don't do that now. Writing is what I do.

I have this space that I come to. Not always. Sometimes I'll write from home. When the weather starts to be nice, I really love finding outdoor spaces.

I like to take one day off a week in a really intentional way, and just be unplugged, if I can, which doesn't always happen. I give my brain a break, because writing is intense.

What's it like to have a midlife publishing debut?

I was always writing with the goal of publishing, since I was a kid. The biggest thing that I would say is different is that shift from writing as a private practice, as something that belongs to me, and something that I would share.

It's not that I didn't share my writing. I published smaller pieces, and I had manuscripts read by writer friends, and I'd received feedback, and all of that.

But that shift from writing as private practice to public product was really big. I had to do work around that.

In fact, I eventually even wondered if part of the reason it took me so long was there was part of me that was unconsciously protecting me and the work from being out there in the world to be consumed or judged or ignored or rejected or whatever.

I definitely had some bumps of feeling really vulnerable and really exposed around that and realizing how much I had, in fact, really valued my quiet, invisible writing practice where nobody really knows what I'm doing here, nobody really knows what I'm putting in these pages.

And now anybody who wants to know can know.

That was a transition and one that I undertook with intention. It didn't blindside me. I was aware that this felt vague, but at the same time, it was like there were little moments of feeling confronted by those things.

It's totally worth it. It's beautiful to have your work touch other people, to hear people who see themselves reflected in a character, or who have never heard somebody say what you're saying or exploring in quite this way, and it means something to them.

That is very meaningful for me. And also it was a long path.

What has it been like to publish and launch your book?

The book was published simultaneously in Canada and the U.S. I'm Canadian. I live in Canada, and both publishers are under the Penguin Random House umbrella.

I feel really fortunate in that, because there was a lot of collaboration, a lot of teamwork. The editors work together. It has the same cover in both countries. So in terms of branding, that's really valuable.

The editorial process was beautiful. It was excruciating, but I always felt that everything was being done in service of the vision that I had for the book. I was very robustly edited in a way that I value.

In terms of marketing, I also had a lot of input. I had a lot of input on the cover with design, which I understand is not usual, necessarily. It's not always the case, but I had a lot of input.

I got to see a lot of options. I got to push back a little bit and say, “We're not there yet.” And they took that seriously. I love the cover that we ended up with.

I started a newsletter in the year leading up to publication. I hadn't had one before, and I really gave some thought into what I wanted to do that would feel authentic to me, that I could feel like I was not being a pushy marketer.

I wanted to do it in a way that felt like I am the gateway between my book and people who might love my book, and I want to help them pass through that portal and find each other.

I want to do it in a way that doesn't feel icky to me, that feels creative, and maybe in some senses, like an extension of my own creative practice.

The newsletter was important to that, because it's sort of my real estate. It's not as loud as social media, which I do. I am on Instagram, but I do have a hard time with the constant lights and sounds. That's not my favorite.

Another thing that I have loved doing is actually interviews like this, whether for podcasts or for written forms.

Regardless of the outcome in terms of, “Am I going to sell books from going on this podcast?,” I'm having a connection with another human being. We're having a conversation that feels authentic and worthwhile and kind of fun.

I really wanted to lean into things like that that didn't feel like I was doing them because I'm supposed to in order to try to sell my book.

I think that helped me, that has helped me to feel more present in the marketing process, and feel like I'm doing something that's like, “I'm still being me.” Not like, “Now I have my marketing hat on and I have to be something I'm not.”

It's not to say that there haven't been bumps or disappointments, but because I was able to minimize the things that didn't feel authentic to me, it kept me reasonably even-keeled.

How has having a book out in the world changed your creative practice? What's next for you creatively?

I am now finishing up my next novel. I am deep in editorial for that.

It was actually beautiful to return to creative practice after being very outward-focused for months with The Mother Act, and I was really happy that I still wanted to do it.

I really didn't feel this pressure to meet an expectation now or or follow up with something that was going to be what people were expecting.

It helped that I had already written most of it. Part of the advantage of taking a really long time to debut your first book is like, I have a whole runway of novels I have written.

I can now refine and revise and have them publication-ready. I'm not going to say quickly—I don't think I'm quick.

The next novel is also a dual-POV novel between two women who are at odds. I don't know if this is my thing now, but in this case, I am really interested in relationships between women.

I've been describing it as an enemies-to-friends platonic friendship rom-com.

I am supposed to be handing in this draft next week. That’s feeling tight, but I'm almost there and there is a publication date.

I'm working with the same editor as I did on The Mother Act and that's beautiful, because there's a shorthand and shared level of trust. I can just cut through most of my angst. She knows what she's talking about.

If you had to give a piece of advice to another writer, what would it be?

Speaking from my own experience, I think that one of the biggest things that made the difference for me to go from floundering writer, writing in circles on novels that never came to anything, to writer of viable novels that get published is embracing what I call a middle path of freedom inside a framework.

Embrace structure, but not in a rigid way.

I was really resistant to the idea of structure for a long time, like learning about story models or doing anything that was going to hamper my creativity or my intuitive nudges. I became really lost in that.

The flip side is, earlier in my life, I had been very rigid and perfectionistic. I couldn't set down a sentence until I already knew it was going to be perfect and that is very inhibiting.

That middle path is finding a way to build structure, like with a writing practice.

It's structure in terms of, like, when are you writing and where are you writing, and maybe accountability buddies.

But also in terms of what's happening on the page, like having a little bit of an outline that you don't hold rigidly, and a little bit of an understanding of why different aspects of the story happen at the points that they happen, and why you're building toward what you're building toward, and having an innate engine to the story, which story structure can help you build.

It actually liberates creativity, is what I eventually learned.

I have a novel writing program where we work for three months together, and everybody's writing a fast, rough draft of a novel. It's really common to either want to have nothing to do with structure because it feels hampering or like it's not creative, or to really cling to it and be like, “I'm going to follow the steps.”

We want to find a way to live in the balance between those things.

What's the best book that you've read recently?

I read The Wedding People recently, by Alison Espach (affiliate link*).

I was in awe of the way she writes a story that has a heck of a lot of heavy themes. There's some real stuff in there. It's also light and fun and frothy and makes you laugh, and doesn't take itself too seriously and isn't too earnest.

I really admire that because I like that sweet spot. I don't want pure fluff, and I also don't want to be dragged down into the depths of despair when reading a novel, you know? It has heft and it also has light, and I feel that was really beautiful.

Meet the Author interviews are lightly edited for clarity.

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Heidi’s experience with transitioning from a private writing practice to navigating publishing and the public reception to a book offers a lot of wisdom for other writers on the road to launching a book!

Grab your copy of The Mother Act (affiliate link*)—and be on the lookout for Heidi’s next book!