Listening for the Voices

KENNY MATHIESON catches up with Inverness-born writer ALI SMITH ahead of the premiere of her play The Seer in Inverness

ALI SMITH is an award-winning novelist and short-story writer. Now based in Cambridge, she was born in Inverness in 1962, and attended Inverness High School and the University of Aberdeen before moving to Cambridge as a graduate student, although she admits she found herself concentrating more on the social and cultural ferment of the city than on her PhD on American and Irish Modernism.

She taught briefly and unhappily at Strathclyde University in the early 1990s, and has also taught Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, and on courses run by the Arvon Foundation.

Her first book, Free Love and Other Stories (1995), won the Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award and a Scottish Arts Council Award. Her first novel, Like, was published to critical acclaim in 1997. Set in Scotland and Cambridge, the book tells the story of an enduring childhood friendship.

A second collection, the enigmatically titled Other Stories and Other Stories, was published in 1999. Her second novel, Hotel World (2001), won the Encore Award, a Scottish Arts Council Book Award, and the inaugural Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award. It was also short listed for both the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Booker Prize for Fiction.

Set during the course of one night, the narrative follows the adventures of five different characters, one of whom is the ghost of a chambermaid killed in a bizarre accident.

Her most recent collection of short stories is The Whole Story and Other Stories (2003) and her latest novel is The Accidental (2004), which won the 2005 Whitbread Novel Award. The book has also been short-listed for the Orange Prize 2006, to be announced in June.

She contributes articles and reviews to journals and newspapers, including The Scotsman and the Times Literary Supplement.

Ali has been writing plays since her student days, and has had worked produced at The Traverse and in London. Dogstar Theatre are about to premiere her play The Seer, originally commissioned by the Highland Festival, and we began our interview by asking how this association had come about.

NORTHINGS: Ali, how did you link up with Dogstar for this new production?

ALI SMITH: It all started as far back as Inverness High School. Matthew Zajac [the co-director of Dogstar Theatre] was there at the same time as I was, although he was four years ahead of me. In fact, we knew each other even before that, because our dads knew each other. Matthew’s dad was my dad’s tailor for a while, and he was also very good at mending trees, believe it or not. I remember he came round and put a poultice on a tree in our garden for us.

If I had carried on struggling writing plays, I would still be struggling writing plays, I suspect.

N: Were you involved in drama at school?

AS: We were both in the drama club. I remember that he used to carry me on his shoulders around the playground, and also that he was the serious actor in the club. He was the one that knew about Method acting and all sorts of things like that. I remember when I was in second year I was in a production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible that did very well, and Matthew was very much the centre of it. We have kind of kept in touch over the years.

N: But they didn’t commission the play?

AS: No, I wrote the play originally for the Highland Festival, but they didn’t then get the money to actually put it on. It has been on my computer now for four or five years, but Matthew and I have often talked about doing something, and he gave this a run-through and felt it would work for Dogstar. I’m delighted that we are going to do it.

N: Can you tell us something about the play itself? Dogstar are describing it as a comedy of manners that only has a bit to do with Hielan’ second sight. Is it set in the Highlands?

AS: It was set in Edinburgh, but could be any metropolis, I think. Because it was originally written to tour in the Highlands, I included some Highland jokes which I think are still in there. It’s about a couple who are very settled, then a wee bit of anarchy enters their life in the form of the woman’s sister, who is a bit of a wild card in their orderly household. It grows increasingly farcical.

N: Is there a parallel between that sister and the disruptive presence of Amber on the holidaying family in The Accidental?

AS: There is, but I wrote this long before I started The Accidental. It’s the same kind of thing, but maybe in the opposite way. I suppose the difference is that at the centre of this play there is a great fabrication – this anarchic force who comes in is really making things up, and you have to choose whether you are going to go with that or not.

N: Is this the first full-scale production of one of your plays?

AS: Not really. I had a wee play on at the Traverse about ten years ago, and I did a play for teenagers last year that was produced at the National Theatre in London. This is a weird thing, though – I wrote all these plays when I was younger, and nobody would put them on, and then as soon as I published a book of short stories, people were telling me I should write a play. I’m not sure what that says about we treat our playwrights!

N: It’s as if they need to be legitimised by writing prose fiction first?

AS: Yes – it seems to me absurd that it takes a book of fiction to arouse interest. If I had carried on struggling writing plays, I would still be struggling writing plays, I suspect.

N: Do you find the process of writing a play different to fiction?
AS: I think it’s a lot easier for me, to be honest. I think with it being dialogue-based it kind of produces itself, almost. Someone says something, and it suggests a reply, and on it goes. It seems to be a very friendly form for me. I wrote plays years ago, and I really enjoy it. When I came down to Cambridge there was a lot of money around to fund productions, and we put on lots of plays every year, and took them to the Fringe in Edinburgh and so on.

N: Are you involving yourself in the rehearsal process for The Seer?

AS: I can’t, unfortunately. I’m too busy with other things, but I know Matthew will do a fantastic job. I will be there for the premiere, though – The Spectrum was where the plays all happened when I was growing up, so it’s quite appropriate that it is opening there in the absence of Eden Court.

N: Is missing out on that involvement a good thing or a bad thing?

AS: I do have my doubts about involving the writer in that process. I really think that it’s better just to let the company get on with it. I feel the same about books – once it’s published it goes out there, and it should be the same with plays. If you give someone a script, then you have to allow them to bring their own dimension to it. I can’t wait to see what Matthew and the cast do with it.

N: You have been short listed again for the Orange Prize for The Accidental, in the wake of picking up the Whitbread last year. I know you have firm views about the literary prize bandwagon …

AS: Short lists are very good for publishers, and I don’t really mind. Now that I’ve been through it a couple of times, it is less of a distraction, and it’s really down to keeping an even keel. It’s a bit like having a brass band turn up outside your house – you have to learn to shut it out.

N: When we spoke about this a couple of years ago, you reckoned it was having a seriously distracting effect on your work …

AS: For the writer, well, for me at any rate, it’s a bit like someone was nice to you for no reason in a shop or in the street or something, it feels as random as that. You feel kind of good for half an hour, and then – well, I can only speak for myself, but the whole time I was on the Orange short list last time round with Hotel World, I blundered around, fell over my bike, walked into things, couldn’t hear or see properly, couldn’t think. And that was me trying really, really hard to ignore it, to just get on with my work! Writers have to be unselfconscious, there has to be no self involved, otherwise how can you do it? You can’t. Directly the prize palaver was over, a miracle – I could see again, I stopped walking into doors, and I could get on with things. It doesn’t do that to me any more – I’m not falling over things this time.

N: The career benefits of prizes are clear enough, at least in sales terms.

AS: I think it is really a pay-off for the publishers, but prizes and awards really do get the book out there and into the hands of readers who otherwise might not have heard of it or found it, which is the best thing they do as far as I am concerned. That is the main benefit career-wise, I suppose, although it’s funny to think of writing books as a career. It always feels so much more tangential than that!

N: But it imposes a public persona on the writer that might not always be welcome?

AS: I don’t think it helps a writer to have a public persona at all, and I never have done. Writers work best from privacy. They may make a lot of money from having a public persona, but they work best by having none at all. Writing is all about admitting other personae into your imagination, often well away from yourself. I’m well aware of the problematic of the situation, but I don’t know what to do about it, because more and more publishers are surviving largely through that brass band noise.

N: How do you screen your working self from that?

AS: It is difficult, and I think you have to know when to back off from all of that and just get on with your work. I think of the way that Margaret Attwood will take herself off to the wilderness, for example, and I think we all need our own version of that to get away from the artificial noise around the book.

N: Maybe you could publish anonymously?

AS: I would happily do that! I’ve heard writers say that they wished they could write a book that nobody would read, which seems to me a bit of an extreme existential response to that situation, but I do have a vision of a bookshop stripped off all those shiny covers, where all the books have just a title on a plain cover and nothing more, and you just pick it up and start to read.

N: Not in this world, though …

AS: No. I’m afraid not!

N: Your fiction seems very preoccupied with narrative voices?

AS: Yes, that is the whole point of fiction for me, and I don’t know that you can have a story that doesn’t have a voice. Once you have found the voice you have the story to a large extent, and for me it is usually more than one voice.

N: What about structure – how do you deal with that in the quite complex narratives of your novels?

AS: For me it comes before the novel, like an overarching framework – you have no idea where the novel will go within that, but at least you have the structure. Once you are into that process it is a blind – and a blinding! – process to some extent, and you really have to give into that and see where it takes you.

N: So that structural framework is malleable rather than a rigid one?

AS: It’s not rigid, no, and sometimes I wish it was more so! At the same time, you know that whatever it was that sent you on that overarching arc in the first place will probably take you through.

N: Is there a continuous editing process at work as you build up the narrative?

AS: There is for me. That is really how I do it. You write something blindly and then you look at it and see what it is you have, and work on it and try to work out where it might want to go, and the next thing is a continuation of that, and you build it up that way. Or I do, at any rate.

N: One of the burdens placed on your shoulders has been as a champion of the short story …

AS: Yes, and I welcome that. I love them. You can do so many things in such a little space in short stories. There is such an elasticity of form there, by which I mean you can do pretty much do anything you like with it and it will probably hold it. If you do it right and edit it right then nothing will be wasted, and everything will resonate. You can do all kinds of things with form without it being a problem for a reader, which isn’t always the case in a novel.

N: Did it need championing?

AS: It did, yes, and does. Publishers are still very uneasy about short stories. They pay less money for them, and they think it is somehow a lesser form than the novel, and there is a perception that readers don’t like them, which definitely isn’t true. Readers do like them, they just can’t find them in bookshops. They tend to have a very short shelf life, and it’s because the trade doesn’t know how to sell them.

N: Which is deadly in the real world?

AS: Unfortunately, yes.
N: But they are a different thing from a novel, aren’t they – they are not just a condensed novel?

AS: No. There are links between all of the forms, novels, short stories, poems, plays, but speaking from my own experience, the novel – especially the novel in English – feels to me like a social form that revolves around social hierarchies and relationships. It demands a big picture, and has to set up and maintain that big picture, whereas in the short story you work with a small picture that then gives you a big picture.
N: You were born and brought up in Inverness – how was it as a place to grow up?

AS: I think it was perfect. We were on the outside of things because we weren’t Edinburgh or Glasgow, we weren’t England we were Scotland, and yet we were growing up in a culture where the outside was becoming just as important as the inside, and Scotland was really questioning itself about its politics and its culture and its institutions, and there were lots of different voices being raised. I find the things that are going on now in the arts in Scotland just incredible, and we have an extremely healthy literary scene, and I think that has come out of the work that has been going on to allow those voices to emerge and take shape.

N: Your sister, Anne Macleod, is also a novelist …

AS: Yes, but I think all of us are creative in our different ways, it’s not just me and Anne. My eldest sister makes fantastic quilts and craftwork, and both my brothers are also very creative. One is a lecturer who also does stand-up comedy, the other is an advertising consultant, and is very involved in his own work.

N: Did that stimulus come from your parents?

AS: Definitely. They both had to leave school early to earn money for their families, and then went through the war years, and I believe they basically brought us up with all the unused energy and creativity they had in them.

N: You made a strategic early withdrawal from academic teaching at Strathclyde University – why was that?

AS: I just wasn’t any good at it, which made it very hard work, and the more I did it, the more depressed I got, until I made myself ill. Teaching is really a vocation, I believe, and you have to really care about what you teach. I cared about books, but not so much about the way I was supposed to teach them. There are no answers to books in that way, but the students had to know exactly what the green light at the end of Gatsby’s jetty meant. There was such a pressure on them to do well in exams by that time – this was the early 1990s, and it was quite different atmosphere to my own university experience.

N: You have taught Creative Writing a bit as well – what is your approach there?

AS: I taught the Creative Writing course at the University of East Anglia for a few months, and what I felt about that was that it was a gift of a year for anyone who could ignore the pressures and machinations of the publishing industry. The group I taught were all very obsessed with publication and prizes, and if I had the power to bring it about, what I would do is set up the course in such a way that none of that touched them for that year. They would live in a peer group and use that gift of a year to focus on their writing. The Arvon courses are different – they are a short but very intense immersion.

N: What can you give them in teaching creative writing?

AS: I think the main things are creating time and space to work, and helping them to get over that hurdle of feeling that they can’t do it. You have to encourage them to open their senses as widely as possible. That, and editing, editing, editing.

The Seer opens at the Spectrum Centre in Inverness on 3 May, and is on tour in May and June – see Dogstar website (link below) for details.

© Kenny Mathieson, 2006

Link

• Dogstar Theatre