Paris Review: Alice Munro

May is Short Story Month, and Alice Munro, along with being one of my favorite writers, is an undisputed master of the short story form. If you have not read any of her work, I suggest you get your hands on one of her collections, pronto. My personal favorite is Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage.

Interviewer: Were you a big reader growing up? What work if any had an influence?

Munro: Reading was my life really until I was thirty. I was living in books. The writers of the American South were the first writers who really moved me because they showed me that you could write about small towns, rural people, and that kind of life I knew very well. But the thing about the Southern writers that interested me, without my really being aware of it, was that all the Southern writers whom I really loved were women. I didn’t really like Faulkner that much. I loved Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers. There was a feeling that women could write about the freakish, the marginal.

Interviewer: Which you’ve always done as well.

Munro: Yes, I came to feel that was our territory, whereas the mainstream big novel about real life was men’s territory. I don’t know how I got that feeling of being on the margins; it wasn’t that I was pushed there. Maybe it was because I grew up on a margin. I knew there was something about the great writers I felt shut out from, but I didn’t know quite what it was. I was terrible disturbed when I first read D.H. Lawrence. I was often disturbed by writers’ views of female sexuality.

Interviewer: Can you put your finger on what it was that disturbed you?

Munro: It was: how can I be a writer when I’m the object of other writers?

*photo from abebooks.com; interview from The Paris Review Interviews, vol.II