It’s unusual for an established author to continue writing lots of short stories. For most, once publishers are clamouring to buy their novels, the short story is only the stuff of memories, of days passed paycheque-to-paycheque in basement apartments and greasy spoon diners. Scottish writer Ali Smith is just that kind of unusual. In Toronto for the International Festival of Authors, Smith spoke candidly about her third collection of short stories, The Whole Story and Other Stories.
“Do I look like I’m doing this for the money?” she asks with a wry smile. “Because really, I’m not doing it for the money. I never was and I never will be. I’m doing it because I can.”
Smith’s first collection of stories, Free Love and Other Stories took the Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award and a Scottish Arts Council Award in 1995. Her debut novel, Like, received broad critical acclaim when it came out in 1997. The followup, Hotel World, was shortlisted for both the Orange Prize and the Booker Prize, two of the foremost honours in the world for fiction. It is clear from her success that she has no need to keep dabbling in short stories, but there is something that keeps drawing her back to her first love.
“I love short stories,” she explains. “It’s a form I love. They’re the epitome of toughness of form, of elasticity of form, of gentleness of form. You can do anything in a short story; you can often do more in a short story than you can in a novel.”
That “more” is probably what Smith does best. Her short fiction in particular has been called just about everything, from ‘experimental’ to ‘postmodern’. “People can call you anything they like. And they will as well!” she laughs. “Postmodern, that’s fine. I’ve been called worse things.”
Smith’s stories rarely have a straightforward narrative, though they are never fully without it. She prides herself on the way her stories challenge conventional notions of the form. “My stories do question structure,” she says matter-of-factly. “How else do we find out what the structures around us are? ‘What is this? What is it doing? Why do we have it? Why is it there? Why did we not even notice it?’ If we don’t ask these questions we’re dead. There’s a kind of aliveness there. I think it’s beautiful.”
A recurring theme in many of Smith’s stories is a kind of gender ambiguity, especially in the relationships she chooses to portray. “True love stories are always interchangeable,” she says. “I knew at the time when I was in love with the wrong gender that the stories that were for me, there weren’t any-or if there were, they were very exclusively for me-all the other stories were exclusively for other people. I think one of the reasons I’m questioning gender, or making gender open, is so that these stories are not exclusive.” Smith pauses for a moment. “Love is not exclusive; it’s embracing. There’s one of my stories where someone falls in love with a tree! Who knows who you’ll fall in love with, or what’s going to hit you?”
In The Whole Story and Other Stories many of the pieces are written in the first person, with the narrator talking about a ‘you’ and a ‘me’ in a relationship. “If you really look closely you can see in some that they’re same-sex,” Smith says. “But you don’t have to look that close. I think it’s very subtle. The reader is thinking it can go either way, thinking, ‘Okay, I’m not sure.’ And that not-sureness is, again, a kind of aliveness.”
