Paris Review interviews

[BitScary]

Link here. These are always such a good read. Always interesting to hear great writers talk about their process. :)

Fascinating, thanks.

I like A.S.Byatt:

'In those days if you were a woman they took away your grant for getting married. If you were a man, they increased it. So there I was with no grant, which secretly at some deep level I was pleased about, because I truly would rather have been a writer than an academic, and I needed to be forced into making that decision. .....

..... When I had finished it, I showed it to an academic at Durham who said, Oh, I expect you’re going to put that in a drawer and do something else now. So I never spoke to him really again. He turned up some years later at my publishers’ claiming that he had been the first encourager of my career!'

Yes I really find myself focussing on all of the women writers' interviews, Tunip - it's interesting to go back a few decades and read their responses. The Alice Munro interview is very good; she refers in it to a memory of 'batting away' her 2-year old's hand from the typewriter, and having to accept that part of her was absent from her children all the while that this burning need to write was in her (I'm paraphrasing - do check out the interview!).

Katharine Anne Porter well worth a read too.