Carol Shields Interview (page: 4 / 6) Pulitzer Prize for Fiction	Print Interview

What effect do you think your experience as a poet had on your novels?

Carol Shields: I don't know.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I loved being a poet. It was a very happy writing time in my life, and I think partly because a poem is such a small thing. I always think of it as a kind of toy. You can get it almost right, and you can never get a novel almost right because a novel is just too big. There are just too many little parts to it, too many twigs and leaflets. But a poem you can get just about right. And it was a very happy writing time in my life, so that I never think of it now as apprenticeship for novel writing. It was a whole different way of wanting to express myself. I would like to think I could go back to it one day, but I seem to have forgotten my way into a poem. I can't do it any more.

[ Key to Success ] Passion

There's certainly great poetry to the language in your novels. The language is extremely poetic.

Carol Shields: I love language, and I think I come out writing novels from that direction rather than from what Nabokov used to call the "aboutness" of novels. That's interesting to me too. But the language is always first.

Tell us about the success of The Stone Diaries. That was quite a leap. You had already enjoyed some success in Canada and elsewhere, but that novel really made you a well-known name.

Carol Shields: Yes.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I had a small, very small -- growing, you know, very small degrees -- audience. But this novel, its success surprised me, because it's rather a sad novel. I thought, "It will find an audience," but I didn't think it would find an audience as large, in fact, as it did. It's also a rather quiet novel. And so in a day when we applaud the novel of action and so on, I thought it's not going to -- it won't have a huge audience. Why it does, I don't know. I think part of it is that people -- I can't tell you how many letters I've had from people who have said, "This is my mother," or "This is my grandmother," or "This is me." We don't have many novels, you know, about middle-class women, and who reads novels? Middle-class women read novels, a lot of them. But there aren't very many novels that actually track the life of a middle-class woman with all of the problems that women have had in this century: the lack of voice, the lack of choices -- and then on the other side of the ledger, the joy of friendships with other women, which is something I've always been interested in writing about, right from the beginning -- the fact of not making the public record, of not being recognized even in one's family or community as a unique human being. So I think those are some of the things that maybe people found in the novel.

How did you find out that you had won the Pulitzer Prize?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Carol Shields: I was in Minneapolis for the day, having lunch at the Canadian consulate, when my editor phoned from New York. They called me to the phone, and she said, "I think you had better sit down," and I thought she was going to tell me she was going to have another baby, because she was in the midst of this period of her life. So she told me the good news, and it came as a surprise because -- and you may know this -- that the short list isn't published for that prize. I had no idea I was on it. There was a period of disbelief, of course. I kept waking up in the middle of the night thinking, "Oh, they're going to tell me tomorrow that it should have gone to Joyce Carol Oates after all."

How did you feel when you got that?

Carol Shields: Well, that sense of unreality, and also the sense, "I want to go straight home." I didn't like being somewhere else. It's sort of a lot to carry around with you. I wasn't sure what it meant either, in this happy state of ignorance; that it would mean, in fact, a huge new audience. I didn't expect that that would happen, and that came as a surprise.

In some ways, you said that it was a distraction, all of the attention, and the interviews, and so forth.

Carol Shields: Sure. A prize like that brings certain distractions. But I suppose I am fortunate in that I don't live in a major literary center, and also that I am of an age where most of the patterns of my life have been set. So I have my own life structures. So nothing is going to change that much in my own life. You know, more mail, more phone calls, more invitations, but, basically, I still live in the same house. I have the same friends. I am still married to the same man. My working patterns are pretty much the same.

Was it hard to write another novel after that?

Carol Shields: No, it wasn't. A lot of people have asked me that, if I felt this sense of responsibility to live up to that prize. No, I didn't. I knew it would be a different kind of novel. It was going to be about something very different. Again, I had a different structure for it in my mind. I was interested in men. You might ask why does a feminist want to write about a man, but men are half of life, and I was interested in where men are today, how men feel about being men. In fact, that whole definition of masculinity, what does that mean? So I was on to all of these new areas of interest. I guess I put The Stone Diaries behind me.

That sounds very healthy.

Carol Shields: Yeah. And it didn't come along. It was four years later, actually, it came along. So that's plenty of time to decompress and begin again.

When there are negative reviews or when you're sort of dismissed as a "woman's writer" or something, are you stung by that kind of criticism? Do you take it in, or do you push it away?

Carol Shields: I take it in.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I read my reviews. I'm very strict with myself. I read them twice and then I put them away. I never look at them again. Because if they're bad, they can make you go crazy. If they're good, they'll make you big-headed and give you false ideas of your powers. So I don't pay as much attention, perhaps, as I did when I was a beginning writer. And I review books, so I understand perfectly well that not everyone is going to like my books. I don't like half the books I pick up. So I suppose I'm fairly sanguine about them. There was one with The Stone Diaries that I find difficult to forgive, and it was a Canadian review, typical Canadian response, "This book is too ambitious." Now this is the kind of thing writers should not be subjected to. So I was rather unforgiving about that one. Other than that, I think reviewers have a right and even a responsibility to go off with their own highly subjective points of view.

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

Are you saying, in a way, that Canadians tend to be self-effacing?

Carol Shields: Oh, yes. We don't want people to be too ambitious. We're a country -- I have a friend who calls us the one country in the world that no one asks out on a second date, which has a bit of truth to it. But along with this national modesty, goes this other self-effacement side. We don't have heroes in the same way, for example, and I think some of those important cultural differences are reflected in our literature and our response to literature.

Where do you live now?

Carol Shields: I live in Winnipeg, in the center of Canada.

It's very interesting your relationship to countries, because you have dual citizenship. Isn't that right?

Carol Shields: Yes, I do.

Didn't you live in France for a while too?

Carol Shields: Yes. I've lived in England, then France at various times in my life.

Do you think that having that very intimate knowledge of both countries has influenced your writing?

Carol Shields: I think it has to. I had an American childhood, and I had an American education, at least my undergraduate education. I live in a different country now. It's taken me years to understand in which ways it is different. I scarcely noticed at first. It's a very simple immigration. But, nevertheless, there's about a million pieces of information you have to re-cover if you are going to live in another country. So all of those things interest me -- cultural background. I've never had a strong sense of nationalism. I've always been a bit ironic when it comes to flag waving, and so that's allowed me, I think, to move fairly easily from one society to another.

So the self-effacing quality in Canada would seem to be sort of a deterrent to writers. I know there are some great Canadian novelists, but not a lot.

Carol Shields: Yes. Well, for many years in Canada, and this happened in Australia, New Zealand, other parts of the old Commonwealth, writers always felt that they were at a disadvantage in that they would have to -- you know, we had one writer in the '40s and '50s and he always set his -- he lived in Toronto, but he set his novels in Chicago, because we felt we had to. We were truly colonized culturally. But we don't have to do that any more. When I wrote The Republic of Love, which was set in Winnipeg, I was worried about how my New York editor was going to respond to this. I thought she was going to say, "Good heavens! You can't set a novel in Winnipeg," and I was all prepared for that, and I was going to say, "If Anne Tyler can write about Baltimore, then I can write about Winnipeg." But she never asked that question.

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