I am again deeply grateful to Maria Popova and her website, Brain Pickings, in this instance for sharing portions of an interview of Alice Munroe by the Swedish Academy after her selection to receive the 2013 Nobel Prize in literature. As Munoroe observess, “I want my stories to move people … to feel some kind of reward from the writing.”
To learn more about Munro, please click here.
To check out her works, please click here.
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When Alice Munro won the 2013 Nobel Prize in literature, she was too ill to travel and receive the prestigious accolade in person, so instead of delivering the customary Nobel acceptance speech in Stockholm, she was interviewed by the Swedish Academy in her home. The conversation — a wide-ranging dance across the spectrum of literature and life — reveals Munro’s sharp, dimensional, highly self-ware mind driven by equal parts confidence and doubt, and above all by an unflinching faith in literature’s capacity to change us.
It’s rather unnerving and anachronistic — though befitting the Achilles heel of the Nobel Prize — that the interviewer seems so bent on asking Munro questions about “women writers” and what it’s like to be one, but she pushes back beautifully and touches on many other aspects of writing not encumbered by the dated and unnecessary gender narrative. Highlights below.
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On receiving her first literary inspiration from the tales of Hans Christian Andersen and using walking as a creative prompt:
“The Little Mermaid is dreadfully sad. . . . As soon as I had finished the story, I got outside and I walked around and around the house where we lived … and I made up a story with a happy ending — because I thought that was due to the Little Mermaid.”
On being somewhat immune to literature’s women problem:
“I never thought of myself as anything but a woman. . . . When I was a young girl, I had no feeling of inferiority at all for being a woman. And this may have been because I lived in a part of Ontario where … women did most of the reading, women did most of the telling of stories — the men were outside doing “important” things and they didn’t go in for the stories. So I felt quite at home.”
On the gift of ignorance and growing up in a small town and using the seemingly mundane as material for literature:
“I think any life can be interesting — I think any surrounds can be interesting. I don’t think I would’ve been nearly so bold as a writer if I had lived in a [bigger] town and if I had gone to school with other people who were interested in the same things I was … what you might call a “higher cultural level.” I didn’t have to cope with that — I was the only person I knew who wrote stories….I was, as far as I knew, the only person who could do this in the world!”
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Here’s a direct link to the complete article.
To learn more about Maria and her wonderful website, Brain Pickings, please click here.