Munro

it's a time of stories: a friend forwarded a link to a short story by Alice Munro in The New Yorker: The Bear Came Over the Mountain

i didn't really know Munro, but when i googled her name, i came to a longer interview in the “Zeit”, which was a good surprise read for Sunday: Munro is 75, and from Canada, and has such a laid-back professionalism. too bad the interview is in german. … let's see, if there is an English interview which conveys some of the passages.. yes, here:

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All writers are interested in depicting how their characters change over the course of a story; you frequently push your characters beyond a state of change—to the point of total transformation. Might you give us an example of this from your new collection?

I think it would be my father who actually changed in a way, through his children. I think it was because I had written a book or books, and he saw that there wasn't some “magical world” out there that people who lived where he lived could never reach. He saw that something like writing a book was a normal activity for some people. And that there wasn't this kind of fear of the world, that most of the people I knew had—a feeling that there were gaps that you could never cross over.

That must be a wonderful thing for you to know.

Yes, it is. But you know, with me, it didn't just happen. Everybody looking at the success they've had tends to think of their own perseverance, but in my case I just happened to be alive at a time when there were people who were there, in Canada particularly, with a strong nationalist notion of building a literature. And there were subsidies by the government. There were magazines just coming in when I was, say, in my thirties, and there was our national radio, which accepted things. And there was a kind of a—I wouldn't say it was a devotion to literature on most people's part in the country, but certainly there were people devoted to literature, to bringing Canadian literature out, and I was just in time to get this. Bob Weaver [broadcaster of Canadian Short Stories, later Anthology, on CBC radio, and a founder and editor of the Tamarack Review ] is one of the people that I really owe everything to. Also, as is obvious, it was an easier time to be a woman, especially as I grew older.

I don't think there was as strong a feeling in Canada as perhaps in some other countries about women being writers. I think there was a pretty strong feeling in the United States, in the Hemingway–Dos Passos era, and also in Australia—when I visited there, it was even worse, much worse. But in Canada, since we'd never had any writers to speak of, they were glad of what they could get.

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(here the whole interview, it's long, i didn't read through it- i just browsed into it and came across the quoted passage)

it was so good to sit outside under the parasol, in the garden, reading the Alice Munro story, gazing at the flowers every now and then.