Maisonneuve interviews Gail Scott

Gail Scott recently spoke to Amelia Schonbek of Maisonneuve about writing, Montreal and her novel The Obituary.

'Amelia Schonbek: Last year at the launch of Prismatic Publics [an anthology of innovative Canadian women’s poetry], I remember you saying that you always feel more at home with poets than with prose writers. Why is that?

Gail Scott: Well, a lot of reasons. It’s really interesting to me that with poetry, you can put so much together from so many different fields, or so many different contexts, in the space of a page, say. And somehow people—good readers—are not uncomfortable with reading between the lines. That’s my dream, actually, for prose. That people learn how to read prose with interest to what’s between sentences… in other words, that they participate. It seems to me that poetry, in terms of its relationship to the reader at least, has the possibility for being extremely democratic, because it invites reader participation all the time.'

Read the whole interview here.