Alice Munro was born on July 10, 1931 in Vinheim, Huron County, Ontario, Canada. In 1968, he published his first collection of short stories, Dance of the Happy Shades, which won the Governor-General's Literary Award of Canada, and since then, he has written 14 works that have won many awards, and his works have been translated into 13 languages and distributed around the world. On October 10, 2013, Alice Munro was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature. With the permission of the copyright owner, Jiujiu Reader, the following is an interview with Alice Munro, originally published in the 134 Summer 1994 issue of The Paris Review.
The Paris Review: This morning, we went to the house where you grew up. Did you spend your entire childhood there?
ALICE MUNRO: yes. My father lived there until he died, and it used to be a farm for foxes and mink. However, now it has completely changed, it is a beauty salon, called "total indulgence". I think they put the beauty salon in the back half of the house and knocked out the whole kitchen.
The Paris Review: Did you go in later?
Monroe: No. Still, I thought, if I go in, I'd like to see the living room. My father built a fireplace there and I'd love to see it. Sometimes I think I should go in and get my manicures done.
The Paris Review: When we noticed a plane parked in the open space across the street from the house, we remembered your novel "White Trash" and "How I Met My Husband".
Monroe: yes, it used to be an airfield. The owner of that farm had a penchant for flying airplanes, and he had a small airplane. He had never enjoyed running a farm, so he gave up farming and became a flight instructor. He is still alive and in perfect health, one of the most handsome men I have ever met. He retired from his position as a flight instructor at the age of seventy-five. Three months after his retirement, he went on a trip and contracted a strange disease, contracted from bats in a cave.
The Paris Review: Your first collection of short stories, The Dance of Happy Shadows, reads very much with the region and the world of your childhood. At what stage did you create it?
Monroe: Those stories were written over a fifteen years before and after. "A Day in the Life of a Butterfly" is one of the earliest and probably completed when I was twenty-one. I also remember writing "Thank You for Sending Me" very vividly, because my first child was in the cradle next to me at the time. So, I should be twenty-two. The final story in the book should have been written when I was in my thirties. "The Dance of Happy Shadows" is one of them, "Peace in Utrecht" is another, and "Images" is the last one to be completed. "The Cowboy Walker Brothers" was also done when I was thirty years old. So, the time span is quite large.
Monroe Manuscript
The Paris Review: What do you think of these works now? Do you reread your own work?
Monroe: There's a novel in this collection called "The Shiny House." Two or three years ago, Toronto's waterfront hotel held a special event to commemorate the publication of the Canadian literary magazine Tamarak Review, which I had read at the event. Because the novel was published in the early days of the magazine, I had to read it aloud on stage. It's really hard for me. I remember the novel I finished when I was twenty-two years old. As I read it, I kept editing it and changing it in some of the ways I had written. Now, it seems, these tactics are outdated. As I read, my eyes wandering over the next paragraph, editing as quickly as I could. I didn't read it again in advance, and I never reread the work before reciting it. When I read my early work, I could realize that there were some methods that I wouldn't use now, and that was the method used by people in the fifties.
The Paris Review: Have you ever made any revisions to a novel that has already been published? Now it seems clear that Proust also revised the first volume of Reminiscences on his deathbed.
Monroe: Yes, and Henry James has also rewritten the simple parts of his work to make them more obscure. Actually, I've been doing it lately. My "CarriedAway" (1991) was selected for America's Best Short Stories in 1991. I reread the novel in the anthology, mainly to see what it was like, and I found one of the passages to be loose. That paragraph seems to be only two sentences, but it's very important. I picked up my pen and rewrote it in the margins of the anthology, mainly to make a reference when the book was published. I often make some changes to the work when I publish the book, and then I feel that the correction is a mistake because I am no longer in the rhythm of writing the story. I saw a small passage that didn't seem to be working as it should, and I would rewrite it to be more compact. However, when I finally read those passages again, I felt that they seemed a little abrupt. So, I'm not quite sure about that sort of thing. The answer may be that the author should stop doing this. You should treat the work like a child, and there is a moment when you say to yourself, this is not mine anymore.
The Paris Review: To what extent do you rely on your editors?
Monroe: The New Yorker was actually the first time I got a taste of what real editing would be. Until then, editing was more or less a review session for me, plus a few suggestions, and that's it. The editor and I definitely need to agree on what can happen in the story. For example, if an editor thinks that nothing happens in William Maxwell's novel, then the editor is of no use to me. Editors need to have a very keen eye to spot areas where I may have misled myself. Chip McGrath of The New Yorker magazine was my first real editor, and he was fantastic. I was really amazed at how deeply he understood what I was trying to express. Sometimes, he doesn't have much to say about my stuff. However, he occasionally gave me a lot of guidance. I rewrote a novel called "Turkey Season," which he had actually embraced. I thought he would simply accept the new version that I had modified, but he didn't. He said, yes, there are some things in the new version that I like more; However, there are some places where I prefer the older version. Why don't we modify the modification to see it? He never said that we needed to revise it. So, we put the story back together and wrote a better story, which I think.
The Paris Review: Have you been writing?
Monroe: It's been since I was in seventh or eighth grade.
The Paris Review: Did you start writing seriously when you were in college?
Monroe: yes. I didn't get a chance to try anything else because I didn't have the money. I knew that I could only go to university for two years because the scholarship was only enough for two years. It was a little vacation in my life, a wonderful time. I've been doing household chores since I was a teenager. So, college was the only day in my life when I didn't have to do housework.
The Paris Review: How old were you when your first book was published?
Monroe: I'm about thirty-six years old. I wrote these stories for many years, and eventually, an editor at Ryerson, a Canadian publishing house, wrote to me and asked if I had enough stories to make a book. The publishing house was later acquired by McGraw-Hill. Originally, the editor wanted to put my novels together with the work of two or three other writers to make a collection. The plan was aborted, but he still had some of my stories on his hands. He later resigned, but gave the manuscripts to another editor at the publishing house. The later editor said that if you can write three more short stories, we can publish the book. So, the year before I published that book, I wrote "Images," "The Cowboy Walker Brothers," and "The Postcard."
The Paris Review: Do you have a particular time to dedicate to writing?
Monroe: When the kids were young, I wrote after they went to school. I wrote very hard in those years. My husband and I own a small bookstore, and even in the years I worked in the bookstore, I could stay at home until noon. I was supposed to do housework at home, but I used it for writing. Later, when I didn't have to go to the bookstore every day, I would write until my family came home for lunch, and continued to write after they had lunch and left. At about half past two in the afternoon, I quickly had a cup of coffee and began to do the housework, trying to finish it before dinner.
The Paris Review: Did you move back to the east because you met Gerry or did you want to work?
Monroe: It's for work. And because my first husband and I lived in Victoria for ten years. Our marriage was already facing dissolution in the last year or two. It's a very small city, and you have a very small circle of friends, and everybody in it knows each other. In my opinion, if your marriage is disintegrating, it is very difficult to continue to be in the same environment. I think it's good for both of us. He couldn't leave because he had to take care of the bookstore. York University, near Toronto, offered me a faculty position where I taught creative writing. But I only did it for a short time, and I hated it. So, even though I didn't have the money, I resigned from that position.
Paris Review: Is it because you don't like professors to create?
Monroe: I don't like it! That's horrible. That was in 1973. York University is one of the more radical universities in Canada, and since my class was full of boys, there was only one girl, but she barely had a chance to speak. They experimented with a style of writing that was very popular at the time, something that was both difficult and clichéd. They don't seem to tolerate everything. For me, in that position, I learned how to shout back out loud and express certain ideas about writing, which is a good thing. I've never taken those ideas seriously before. However, I don't know how to communicate with them, how to not be an enemy of them. Now I probably know how to do it. What I teach, though, has little to do with writing — it's more like good training for a future career in the TV industry, or a very comfortable way to endorse something clichéd. I should have been able to change something, but I couldn't. One student, who wasn't in my class, gave me a story she had written. I remember reading it with tears in my eyes, because it was so well written, and because it had been a long time since I had read a good student work. She asked me how I could register for my course and I said, no! Don't go near my class, just keep showing me what you've written. She later became a writer. The only one of my students who did it.
The Paris Review: Is Canada expanding its number of universities offering creative writing majors, as the United States did?
Monroe: Canada hasn't expanded much in this area. There is no writing program like the University of Iowa in the United States. However, teaching writing in universities has also made some people's personal careers. For a while, I sympathized with them and felt that their stuff was impossible to publish. But the fact that they may earn three times as much as I would have always earned is something I don't understand.
The Paris Review: It seems like most of your story takes place in Ontario. Did you choose to live here, or did it happen by chance?
Monroe: Now, I would choose to live here. This is the house left by Gerry's mother, where he used to live and take care of her. My father and stepmother also lived in this area. We feel that we have a limited amount of time to take care of the elderly in our lifetime, and after that, we will move on with our lives. Of course, there are many other reasons why we didn't leave. The older generation is gone, but we have always lived here. Now, one of the reasons we're here is because the scenery is so important to both of us. It's great that we have that in common. And, thanks to Gerry, I was able to see the place from such a different perspective. I can't have any other landscape, a country, a lake, or a small town with the same feelings. I'm aware of that now, so I'll never leave.
The Paris Review: It's not because you moved back east because you decided you wanted to write here.
Monroe: I've never made any decision for the idea of writing, although I've never thought about giving it up. I guess I just can't quite understand the statement that some conditions are more favorable for you to write than others. The only thing that would stop me from writing was writing as a profession – like when I was defined by the public as a writer and I was given an office to write.
The Paris Review: Your first book won the Governor-General of Canada Prize for Literature, which is roughly equivalent to the Pulitzer Prize in the United States. In the United States, there are very few writers who have won such great honors with their debut novels. And once something like this happens, it seems that the writer will encounter more difficulties in his writing career after that.
Monroe: Well, first of all, I wasn't young anymore. However, it was more difficult later. For almost a year, I couldn't write anything, just because I kept thinking that I would have to write a novel. I'm not pressured to say that I have to write a book that is an extremely best-selling book that everybody is talking about, like the one that Eun-mi Tan did after her debut novel. That book of mine sold so badly that no one had heard of it, even though it won the Governor's Literary Award. You go to a bookstore and look for the book, but they don't.
The Paris Review: Are book reviews important to you? Do you think you've ever learned anything from the comments? Did a comment hurt you?
Monroe: Important, and it's not important, because you can't really learn much from the comments, and of course, you don't get hurt too much by it. Criticism of your work can make you feel humiliated in public. Even though it doesn't matter, you still want people to applaud you off stage, not to bang you off.
The Paris Review: Were you a lover of books growing up? Are there any works that have influenced you?
Monroe: Reading was really my life until I was thirty. I'm living in the book. The writers of the American South were among the first writers who moved me, and they showed me that you can describe small towns, describe rednecks, and that's what life is so familiar to me. Interestingly, though, even I didn't realize that the novelists of the American South that I really loved were women. I'm not too fond of Faulkner. I love Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Katherine Ann Porter, and Carson McCullers. They made me think that women can also write about strange marginalized things.
The Paris Review: That's what you've been writing about, too.
Monroe: yes. I've come to realize that this is the realm of women, and that most of the novels about the mainstream of real life are the realm of men. I don't know how this feeling of being a marginal person came about, I wasn't pushed to the edge. Maybe it's because I grew up in a marginal society myself. I know that there are certain things about great writers that I don't feel I have, but I'm not sure what they are. The first time I read D.H. Lawrence's work, I was extremely uneasy. I've always been upset by writers' descriptions of the sexual aspects of women.
The Paris Review: How confident are you in writing? After all these years, how has your self-confidence changed?
Monroe: I've always been very confident in writing, but there's also a mixture of worry, and it's completely wrong to worry that confidence. In a way, I feel like my self-confidence comes from my dullness. Also because, I was so far from the mainstream of literature that I didn't realize that women don't become writers as easily as men, and the same is true for people from lower social classes. If you live in a small town where you don't even meet a person who actually reads, and you think you can write well, you certainly think you have a rare talent.
The Paris Review: You're a master at avoiding contact with the literary world. Do you do it consciously, or is it dictated by specific circumstances?
Monroe: For a long time, of course, it was circumstance; Later, though, it was an option. I think I'm a friendly person, but not sociable. Mainly because as a woman, a housewife, a mother, I need to set aside a lot of time, and this is interpreted as a fear of socializing. If it weren't, I might have lost my self-confidence. I'm going to hear too many conversations that I don't understand.