The Paris Review has an interview with Alice Munro; I think from an older issue (because it doesn’t mention her 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature), but it popped up in my feed today, and I hadn’t seen it before. In any case, I enjoyed it so much that I have tweeted it twice and am now blogging about it here. She says many interesting things about the work itself; the part that resonated most strongly for me is posted below. I find it deeply comforting to see someone so accomplished and prolific acknowledging the fragility of her own confidence. And I love the idea that being an introvert, or simply unsocial, can be an asset — to anyone, really, but especially to a writer.
MUNRO: In writing, I’ve always had a lot of confidence, mixed with a dread that this confidence is entirely misplaced. I think in a way that my confidence came just from being dumb. Because I lived so out of any mainstream, I didn’t realize that women didn’t become writers as readily as men, and that neither did people from a lower class. If you know you can write fairly well in a town where you’ve hardly met anyone else who reads, you obviously think this is a rare gift indeed.
INTERVIEWER: You’ve been a master at steering clear of the literary world. Has this been conscious or largely circumstantial?
MUNRO: It certainly was circumstantial for a long time, but then became a matter of choice. I think I’m a friendly person who is not very sociable. Mainly because of being a woman, a housewife, and a mother, I want to keep a lot of time. It translates as being scared of it. I would have lost my confidence. I would have heard too much talk I didn’t understand.
INTERVIEWER: So you were glad to be out of the mainstream?
MUNRO: This is maybe what I’m trying to say. I probably wouldn’t have survived very well otherwise. It may have been that I would lose my confidence when I was with people who understood a lot more than I did about what they were doing. And talked a lot about it. And were confident in a way that would be acknowledged to have a more solid basis than mine. But then, it’s very hard to tell about writers—who is confident?
Science & Story 
it is SO reassuring to know that even alice munro — alice munro! — chooses the quiet road, one filled with the self-second-guessing that draws some of us into the quietest nooks and crannies, and keeps us from wanting much to do with all the noise out in the mainstream, where no one else seems to suffer from fear of stepping on toes or making noise the world hardly needs….
LikeLike