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| Interview with Ali Smith by Frances Gapper ALI SMITH’s voice is quick, with a soft Inverness accent – she has been accused of reading her own work aloud too fast, but says she can’t slow down. She has piercing eyes in a changeling’s face and uncanny ways of suddenly being there or not. When I arrive at her house, in a hidden, garden-filled Cambridge street, she’s just unloading the Saturday morning shopping and insists on washing her hair before the interview, but is back in about 30 seconds, head wrapped in a white towel. We sit on a sofa in a book-lined room, just inside the front door but absolutely quiet. Her partner Sarah Wood, another swift appearer and vanisher, has settled the tape recorder on a chair between us. The floor is wood laminate, like the one gouged up with a hammer and screwdriver – ‘that laminate cost us a fortune to put down’ – in ‘May’, a story in Smith’s new collection, The Whole Story and Other Stories. This, her third collection, was written because ‘I was supposed to be writing a novel and I couldn’t.’ Realising that three or four of her stories were set in different months, she had the idea of a collection tracing the cycle of a year. ‘Only one story has the title of a month, but they’re all about different months. I didn’t want to do it too obviously, because that would be annoying, it would just feel like you were being corralled as a reader and a writer, but if I kept it subtle enough, it would probably have some proper effect of cycle.’ She wrote most of the stories between February and September 2002, then took the collection on retreat and wrote the last story there. ‘You know how every month has a feel to it which you only really notice at that first moment? You realise the thing has moved on, you think, oh it smells different now, or it’s colder, or…. That’s what I concentrated on for each story, the moment of change.’ There’s no story called ‘The Whole Story’ in the collection, she points out… For the whole interview, read Issue 18 » Subscribe! Go to » Ali Smith's Method |
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For more on ALI SMITH, go to www.contemporarywriters.com
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