Graeme Gibson Interviews Alice Munro: From Eleven Canadian Novelists Interviewed by Graeme Gibson

By Graeme Gibson and Alice Munro

In honour of Alice Munro's Nobel Prize for Literature, Anansi Digital is re-releasing a candid interview with Munro by Canadian novelist Graeme Gibson.

Taken from Eleven Canadian Novelists, which was originally published in 1973 by House of Anansi Press, the interview is a revealing and wide-ranging dialogue between two writers, and a rare view of Munro and her work.

With the intuition of an insider, Gibson asks the important questions: In what way is writing important to you? Do writers know something special? Does he or she have any responsibility to society? The result is a fascinating and immensely readable conversation with the famed short story writer at the beginning of her career.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anansi Digital
• Release date: Nov 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781770898158

Graeme Gibson

Graeme Gibson is the acclaimed author of Five Legs, Communion, Perpetual Motion, and Gentleman Death. He is a long-time cultural activist, and co-founder of the Writers’ Union of Canada and the Writers’ Trust. He lives in Toronto.

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GRAEME GIBSON

INTERVIEWS

ALICE MUNRO

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From

Eleven Canadian Novelists

Interviewed by Graeme Gibson

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I’ll begin with a general question: do you think writers know something special, in the way physicists or anthropologists do?

You mean probably that writers are . . . have just seen something 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 every day. It seems to me very important to do something with this.

Yes. I mean, 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.

A slightly different kind of question: 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