A Reader's Interview with Katie Zdybel

The month of Alice Munro continues.

Hello! Welcome to a new series in which I interview authors about their work and what they love to read. This week, I’m excited to be talking to Katie Zdybel, author of the short story collection, Equipoise (2021 Exile Editions).

Katie and I met in the summer of 2021 in an intensive writing workshop with Tom Jenks, editor of Narrative Magazine. Back then, I was relatively new to creative writing and had never attempted fiction. Katie was an award-winning author whose debut short story collection was blurbed by Joyce Carol Oates. We both wrote stories about female friendship for the workshop, and Katie praised and defended my story. I struggle to find the right words to convey how much that meant to me at the time. I was delighted that she wanted to stay in touch after the workshop ended.

When Alice Munro died last month, I immediately thought of Katie because I knew that Munro was an important influence on Katie’s writing. For a glimpse into what Munro means to Katie, see this beautiful tribute on Katie's Instagram (which you should follow for book recommendations and gorgeous photos.)

I talked to Katie about Munro, book clubs, and the magic of connecting with a writer who understands where you come from.

I imagine Alice Munro’s writing is sort of always in the air in Canada. How did you first discover her? 

We were assigned one of her books in high school, The Dance of the Happy Shades. I didn’t like her stories for the first chunk of my reading life. I thought her stories were hard on male characters. I was lucky—all the major male figures in my life were good people. Munro doesn’t really have lovely men in her stories. Then in university, I took a class that would be about one Canadian author, you didn’t know which one. It turned out to be her. I was around 19 or 20 at the time, and I still didn’t like her stories.

What changed?

In my late twenties or early thirties, I read her in a book club and loved it! I was the only one—all the other women found her too negative. 

Isn’t that funny? I’ve had that experience too—when you are the one in a book club who defends a book, you become sort of attached for life. 

Yes! But I think I had also become a better reader by that time. I was starting to write short stories. I read Monkeys [a collection of linked stories] by Susan Minot, and then the Alice Munro collection. After that book club experience, I read Munro nonstop for about a year. This is still my pattern: every six months or so I go back to Munro, like a tonic. I think I’ve read everything by her at this point, and I keep a spreadsheet of her stories with notes.

What are you looking for when you reread a Munro story?

Mostly I’m hungry for that voice, or sometimes it’s more about place. She’s from where I’m from in southwest, rural Ontario, and even writes about this tiny town, population 500, where I went to school. She wrote about these places, the Maitland River, backroads that I remember. She’s written about the town where I live now. We both write about women and domestic fiction. Through a writer’s lens, I’m looking for what is at the heart. You know, people from the coasts can look down on small town, rural life. Munro was really, really in love with Ontario—people think that’s strange. 

Being from Texas, I don’t know anything at all about people on the coasts looking down on rural life. But seriously, I know what you mean. I love when I find an author who writes about Texas with love and ambivalence, which is how I feel about this place.

Haha, yes! I never read a biography of Munro until after she died. In A Double Life [an out-of-print biography of Munro by Catherine Sheldrick Ross], the author writes about how, to Munro, this part of Ontario is magic. She did write about Toronto, but with a visitor’s eye. I find her writing so comforting. No one else in the world does that.

What do you recommend when people ask you where to start with Munro?

 The Beggar Maid (linked stories, also published as Who Do You Think You Are?), The Love of a Good Woman, Runaway

The story that we read together in Tom Jenks’ writing workshop was “A Real Life.”

Of course! The character of Dorrie in that story is universal—you don’t have to be from here to appreciate her. But women like that were abundant in rural Ontario at one time. The way they spoke, the house Dorrie lived in where she trapped a wild animal. She’s eccentric, slightly feral. 

Also the uncle in Lives of Girls and Women—another person on the fringes of society. Munro is so honest about these people, she doesn’t shy away, but she’s also not judgmental. 

Tell me about transcribing Alice Munro.

I’ve transcribed her stories because I wanted to know how they worked. She didn’t give a lot of interviews. Her narrative voice seems so intuitive, but she was also a fantastic reviser, sometimes even after publishing, like the short story “Corrie,” where the version that was ultimately published in the collection Dear Life has a different ending than the version published in the New Yorker.

It was so interesting to get into each word, to look at why her sentences turn here instead of there. I still don’t know the answer to how she does what she does. It’s still not transparent. 

Munro holds opposite ends of a feeling or experience in one sentence. Remember that thing that Tom Jenks said—you should only use an adverb if it changes the word that comes after it? Munro does this in the middle of a sentence, often. Her characters hold opposites, too: freedom and entrapment, shame and joy. It’s what makes them so believable. Her writing feels so real. She gets at a deeper truth.

Other interesting things

• I am a strong advocate of keeping a spreadsheet of what you read, like Katie does for Alice Munro short stories. Here’s an old post about how I keep track of my reading (some of which I learned from that workshop with Tom Jenks), including a link to a spreadsheet that you can use to create your own Book of Books.

• Here is an article about the three endings of Munro’s story, “Corrie.”

• Sheila Heti wants to live like Alice Munro. “As a writer, she modeled, in her life and art, that one must work with emotional sincerity and precision and concentration and depth — not on every kind of writing but on only one kind, the kind closest to one’s heart.”

• In this interview, Katie named Stoner by John Williams as a book she wishes she’d written. That’s the third time Stoner has been recommended to me recently, so I guess I need to read it!

If you like beautifully crafted stories about mothers, daughters, husbands, wives, friends, and other complex humans, I promise you will love the 10 stories in Katie’s debut short story collection, Equipoise.