Go ask Alice
To mark the awarding of the Nobel Prize for literature to Alice Munro, the House of Anansi has re-released, under Anansi Digital, an interview with the acclaimed short story writer conducted by GRAEME GIBSON. It was part of a collection published in 1973
Do you think writers know something special, in the way physicists or anthropologists do?
You mean probably that writers are ... have just seen some thing special. I don’t think they know something special. I do think that they, perhaps, just perhaps they see things differently. Well I know to me, just things in themselves are very important. I’m not a writer who is very concerned with ideas. I’m not an intellectual writer.
I’m very, very excited by what you might call the surface of life, and it must be that this seems to me meaningful in a way I can’t analyze or describe.
Now when you say it’s not that they know something special, but they see something special ...
what kinds of things?
Well for me it’s just things about people, the way they look, the way they sound, the way things smell, the way everything is that you go through everyday. It seems to me very important to do something with this.
Perhaps one of the most exciting things I found in reading your stuff was an incredible kind of recognition of how things are.
It seems to me very important to be able to get at the exact tone or texture of how things are. I can’t really claim that it is linked to any kind of a religious feeling about the world, and yet that might come closest to describing it.
In what way is writing important
to you?
God.., do you mean why do I do it? I don’t know if I can get at that. I always have done it. It’s ... do you mean is it important as a kind of therapy? No, that’s not it. I don’t know why it’s important. I don’t understand this. I know that I’m never not writing, so that I’m not just sort of turning out one book and then taking a rest and then turning out another book. I’ll never live long enough to deal with all the ideas that are — things that are working, because I write very slowly and things, with me, things sort of jell very slowly.
But there are always things there that just — well I’m thinking of a thing I’m working on now which I haven’t really begun to write much of at all, and it just, it exists and so I’m going to have to put it down or forget it. If I can.
You say it exists. So then is your writing a response to something that is simply there?
Not there in the external world. It’s there in my head, this story, if you want to call it that, the characters, the relationship, the lives of these people. I can now see it in my mind, not very well, rather dimly, and things will change as I work it out, but something is there that I’m probably going to have to deal with. Though other things are also there that I have failed to deal with. Often I fail to deal with things several times before I work them out successfully. But it’s all there, and of course it comes from the external world. Where else would it come from? But I’m not the kind of writer that says: Now I’ve got to do something, I’ve got to write something about this existing problem or this relationship or this experience I’ve had. I don’t work that directly.
It’s not problem solving them?
No.