Sydney Hegele
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Bird Suit
by Sydney Hegele
Invisible Publishing, 2024
Fiction/Novel
​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.
Praise for Bird Suit
“Mythological creatures and strange relationships shape this beguiling debut novel [which] takes flight thanks to the beauty of its prose.”—Publishers Weekly
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“[Hegele] has created a fictional world that is at once intimate and mythic …the sheer scope—and interconnectedness—of which is staggering… Bird Suit is a big book in a small package, a novel of ideas steeped in sex and death, with bold questions of faith, self-knowledge and the nature of reality rooted in the image of sirens rising from the deep, singing their songs of destruction and rebirth.”—Toronto Star
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“A queer take on the the genre of southern Ontario gothic literature…[which] tends to examine the secrets, gossip and hypocrisies of white Christian settler communities, sometimes invoking supernatural elements to illustrate the effects of stifling unwanted emotions and desires and suffering under repressive social norms…. Hegele has crafted a tense, provoking novel [that’s] filled with deeply observed, profoundly flawed characters, and compels to the very end.”—H Felix Chau Bradley, Xtra
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“At the center of Bird Suit is a seemingly-idyllic tourist town, with plenty of scenic options for residents [as well as] a secret community … [It] makes for a memorable juxtaposition of the folkloric and the quotidian.”—Reactor (formerly Tor.com)
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“[Hegele’s characters] are broken in every humanly way [yet] written about without sensationalizing them or downplaying them. Bird Suit is a book you will joyfully return to like a complex childhood experience that you desperately want to make sense of and know you can only grow from meditating on.”—Canthius
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“Gorgeously strange, marvelously written, bursting with peril, howling with life, Bird Suit is a splendid novel, the kind you don’t want to end, the kind that follows you (listen for the flapping) around.”
—Laird Hunt, author of Zorrie and In the House in the Dark of the Woods
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“Bird Suit is soft and perfumed as a peach, with a hard, brutal, and wildly strange pit at the centre. This is a special novel, in the sense that it feels like something biological and rare, found in a mossy forest, but it is of our world, however skewed it may seem, because it investigates the difficult, true things of life. Love, sex, friendship, hatred, cruelty, violence, faith. Sydney Hegele’s writing is a delight to read, and their characters are compelling and absorbing. You will love them, cry for them, and shake your fist at them. Bird Suit marks the arrival of an original, brilliant new voice.”
—Richard Mirabella, author of Brother & Sister Enter the Forest
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The Pump
by Sydney Hegele
Invisible Publishing, 2021
Fiction/Short Fiction
Winner of the 2022 ReLit Awards
Finalist for the 2022 Trillium Book Award
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A Gothic collection of stories featuring carnivorous beavers, art-eaters, and family intrigue, for fans of Shirley Jackson and Flannery O'Connor
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The small southern Ontario town known as The Pump lies at the crossroads of this world’s violence—a tainted water supply, an apathetic municipal government, the Gothic decay of rural domesticity—and another’s.
In Hegele’s interconnected stories, no one is immune to The Pump’s sacrificial games. Lighthouse dwellers, Boy Scouts, queer church camp leaders, love-sick and sick-sick writers, nine-year-old hunters, art-eaters—each must navigate the swamp of their own morality while living on land that is always slowly (and sometimes very quickly) killing them.
Praise for The Pump
“What a strange surprising delight this collection was… at once untenable and grotesquely beautiful.”
– Heather O’Neill, author of When We Lost Our Heads
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“[Hegele's] writing is beautiful… Nightmarish and yet somehow fantastical, [The Pump] explores the question of morality in a town that represents the world at its most baldly violent.”—This Magazine
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“Sydney Hegele’s (aka Sydney Warner Brooman) short fiction collection The Pump just won the ReLit Award. I read The Pump months ago, but I keep returning to that hair-raising town haunted by colonial industry and its various insidious poisons. The Pump is like a gothic small town on acid. This affirmed me, scared the crap out of me, and made me wondered how the author did it. The Pump is an assured and daring debut book about class, gender, desire, and the natural world in revolt against our abuse of it: astonishing for a first collection.—Tanis MacDonald, The Fiddlehead
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“Canadian author Sydney [Hegele's] debut collection of short fiction instantly cements the non-binary writer as a name to watch. Their gothic tales of fantastical creatures and forged family is magical realism at its best. Drawn from [Hegele's] upbringing in Grimsby, Ont., the stories feel rooted in both the mythic and the modern, touching on parenthood, loss and transitions.”—Chatelaine, Best Buzzy Books
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“The Pump opens the door to a haunted world that is not easily forgettable. But proceed with caution: this collection will undoubtedly get under your skin.”—Quill & Quire
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“In foregrounding the queer aspects of their stories and literalizing the horror that traditionally remains metaphorical, [Hegele] has created a collection that doesn’t tug at the edges of our literary pieties so much as tear them to shreds. By contorting beloved symbols of Canada’s national literature and character into bizarre and unfamiliar shapes, [Hegele] simultaneously locates their stories within a tradition and explodes that tradition for future practitioners.”—Toronto Star
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“Hegele’s work has been compared to that of Alice Munro, and, for once, this comparison is accurate: Hegele is Munro through the looking-glass, and this collection is Southern Ontario Gothic queered and rabid.”—Erin Della Mattia, Prairie Fire
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“These stories are full of queerness and weirdness and a gothic sense of dread. … If you’re looking for small town/dark magic vibes, this one’s for you.”—Anuja Varghese, author of Chrysalis
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“A strange and satisfying debut which, despite its nightmarish magic, manages to capture something terrifyingly real.”—The Miramichi Reader
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“If you left your small hometown because you were “different” – gay or trans in particular – you will see yourself in this smart, authentic and beautifully written book. If you didn’t, you will be spellbound nonetheless.”—Andrew Dobson
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“The Pump follows the Southwestern Ontario Gothic tradition, exposing the warped underside of small-town Ontario through a series of interconnected short stories… The Pump is strange, no doubt, but it is delicious in its strangeness.”—Erica McKeen, The Temz Review
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“[Hegele's] remarkably self-assured voice remains singular, authentic and wry. The Pump will stay with you, leaving its taste in your mouth: dread and mossy yellow water.”—Broken Pencil
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“The Pump is populated with the kind of tough, awkward, dark, and tender characters you often find trapped in small town, no-place Canada. You’ll also find beavers, salt domes, a lighthouse, marshes, more beavers, a Mercury Villager, mosquitoes, and the rest of the beavers. [Hegele] has woven an inescapable, ferocious dream of a book. Good luck getting out.”—John Elizabeth Stintzi, author of Vanishing Monuments
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“Bristling with magic, horror, and romance, Sydney [Hegele's] The Pump transforms small-town Southern Ontario into a place of violence and sacrifice — or maybe presents it as it truly is. Like nothing I’ve ever read before, these killer beavers, strange diseases, and infectious waters wouldn’t leave my head and drew me back to their world again and again. If only I blurbed delightfully weird books like this for the rest of my life, I’d be happy.”—Jess Taylor, Author of Play, Pauls, and Just Pervs
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“This is the Southern Ontario that we don’t openly acknowledge but that scrapes at the back of our memories. The Pump shows us the surreal violence of living in the 401’s sprawl and the staggering beauty of the nature that surrounds it. Don’t be fooled by the nightmarish quality of these stories: they are as real as the Mercury Villager that Sydney [Hegele] drives us in on. This is horror in broad daylight. These are the living ghosts that haunt so many of us who grew up here.”— Jia Qing Wilson-Yang, Lambda Award-winning author of Small Beauty
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“This is what small-town Ontario looks like when David Attenborough is a distant memory, when social structures are as polluted as the water, when myth has returned—big time—in mounting waves, sweeping our smaller stories out to sea. I don’t what is more terrifying: that The Pump exists, or that here, in this wretched, sinking place, you can find something that you desperately love, something that you want to survive. The Pump is an astonishing debut collection from a writer who is just warming up.”—Tom Cull, author of Bad Animals
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“These short stories delve deeply into poignant, painful aspects of humanity and the hardships people contend with including death, identity, home, and family… Hegele has a knack for making these dark tales so satisfyingly, sickeningly funny [and] all their crude, harsh prose show you how ugly yet simultaneously beautiful the world can be.”—The Ampersand Review
The Last Thing I Will See Before I die
by Sydney Hegele
845 Press, 2022
Poetry/Chapbook
“Visceral and fearless. The Last Thing I Will See Before I Die unflinchingly dissects its own body. Hegele slices cross-sections of past and present, pulls the meat apart before the reader and asks what it means to be seen." -Fawn Parker, author of Hi, It's Me
“Tadpoles, minnows, foals, and chameleons. These are some of the creatures that appear in Sydney Hegele's debut poetry chapbook, The Last Thing I Will See Before I Die, a collection that sings of rebirth and change through language and the act of naming—of becoming. Full of startling images and rushes of music, they write of the repercussions of violence as “rotting lunch / in a wet paper bag” while simultaneously inviting the reader into the closeness of bed, where love “lets us / rest.” Vibrant and unforgettable, these poems are a celebration of the act of (re)creation."
-Jenny Berkel, author of Grease Dogs