Of course I have to talk about Alice Munro winning the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature. She’s the master of the short story at a time when short story writers don’t get much attention or acclaim. Will this change how short stories are viewed? I can only hope.
Munro, unable to attend the award ceremony in Sweden due to poor health, states that she may stop writing altogether. Now this, I find hard to believe. I know she has said this before, but I think what gets me is I cannot imagine uttering these words. I think, breathe and live in other worlds I’ve created with my words, trying to find what words—however subtle— would hit the reader.
I haven’t been living for 82 years, so she has some years on me, but as writer, I love what I can create. I was reading a recent interview with Elizabeth Gilbert in Poets & Writers magazine. She stated that she had changed, and so had her voice since writing Eat, Pray, Love, which leads me back to what Alice Munro said.
This is not uncommon with creative people or any human. We are not the same at age 20, as we are at age 40, nor are we the same at age 40, as we are at age 60. Creativity reflects those changes. There are stories I’ve written that I haven’t gone back to and probably won’t. I’m no longer the person that wrote them. I believe this is Alice Munro’s point. She’s changed and she may not write again; however, we still have her stories to hold and read.