Ahead of her upcoming Roundtable seminar on the short story — which offers incisive, close readings of three masterful stories by Elizabeth Bowen, Mavis Gallant, and Alice Munro — award-winning writer Tessa Hadley (author of Free Love, Late in the Day, The Past, and many others) talked to us about the mysteries of the form, the personal shock of reading Munro for the first time, why she loves reading in a group, and much more.
Your Roundtable seminar focuses on the short story as a form. Short stories are how many aspiring fiction writers cut their teeth, but they are surprisingly difficult to pull off. From a craft perspective, what is appealing to you about the short story? Beyond the obvious feature of length, how is a story different than a novel?
I think the answer to that would be different for every writer. Personally, I felt that I could manage everything that was going on inside the smaller, tighter space of a story, at a time when I knew that I was still failing to manage the long arcs of a novel. It took me a long time before I had the structural confidence required to write a novel. The story felt like an easier place to begin: not that it’s actually easier. These masterly story writers that we’re going to be looking at for the seminar — nothing is easy about writing that well. In three or four of my own early short stories, most of which never appeared in my books, I can remember the sensation of beginning to put down sentences where I suddenly knew exactly what I wanted to say and why I was saying it. As a writer, I had found my terrain. It’s a feeling of concentration that I had, and maybe concentration is the simpler answer to your question. It’s good for an apprentice writer to be invited to concentrate in one place. I’ve never said that before, but I think that’s probably it.
Your seminar offers a close reading of three masters of the form, one exemplary story per session: Elizabeth Bowen, Mavis Gallant, and Alice Munro. Why did you choose these writers?
Oh, just because they’re my favorite writers. You have a wide extended family of writers who are important to you, but then there’s a core nuclear family full of reserves of energy for you. The writers who are your intimates — they don’t know they are, poor things — you make your life around reading them. These three are all from my nuclear family.
How have they influenced your own writing and thinking? Why do you love them so much?
Density. Each sentence is worth stopping over. Nothing is wasted. Everything is loaded. And their huge intelligence — you get to go inside their sublime gift for perceiving the world. When I’m writing, I almost always have one of their books open beside me. I first was enabled to write by Alice Munro. She was in her absolute prime when I found her. I can remember being in a bookshop, full of skepticism — I’m a horrible reader, I always pick up a book thinking it’s going to be bad — and I stood in the bookshop turning the pages and thinking there had to be a hitch, there had to be something wrong with it. And then I was entirely conquered. I was hers. The first thing I learned from her is that the ordinary, in writing, is transformed into the extraordinary.
Is there a particular moment in an Alice Munro story that you remember having this effect on you?
I remember reading the title story of The Moons of Jupiter — obviously an autobiographical story — in which a woman walks out of the Toronto hospital where her father is dying, reads a story by another woman in a magazine and feels that hers will never be as good. The idea that even Alice Munro felt anxious and rivalrous and no good — that’s a distinct memory.
What do you hope participants will take with them from this seminar after it’s finished?
More than anything, to fall in love with one of these writers, if not all of them. And the peculiar joy of sharing reading. Reading is designed to be done in solitude, and that’s absolutely fine. But there is something joyous about sitting together with people who have just read the same story that you’ve read and going deeper with them than you could do all alone. The story becomes this lovely, live experience in a group. Over the years this reading in groups has become one of my great pleasures in life.
Reading the Short Story with Tessa Hadley begins Tue, Jan 17 on Roundtable.