Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

PROLOGUE
Alice Munro, August 1974
    This ordinary place is sufficient, everything here is touchable and mysterious.
– “Everything Here Is Touchable and Mysterious” (1974)
    O n August 18, 1974, CBC Radio aired a long interview with Alice Munro conducted by Harry J. Boyle on its
Sunday Supplement
program. Munro’s third book –
Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You: Thirteen Stories
– had been published by McGraw-Hill Ryerson the previous spring, and she was just about to take up a year’s position as writer-in-residence at the University of Western Ontario. The year before, Munro had returned to Ontario from British Columbia after making for herself what she later described for one of her characters as “a long necessary voyage from the house of marriage,” leaving James Munro, her husband of twenty-two years, in the Victoria house where he still lives. 1 Their daughters, Sheila, twenty, Jenny, seventeen, and Andrea, seven, were at varying stages of independence and dependence. Munro was worried about how the breakup would affect them, especially Andrea, but was pressing ahead. Her new life involved no real plan beyond leaving British Columbia for Ontario. Alice Munro had decided to come home.
    “Home,” despite more than twenty years on the west coast, was still Ontario. Specifically, it was Wingham, Huron County, Ontario – the place Alice Ann Laidlaw had left for marriage to James Armstrong Munro and a shared life in Vancouver at the very end of 1951. She was then twenty years old and had completed two years on scholarships at the University of Western Ontario; he was twenty-two, had a general arts B.A. from Western and a job at Eaton’s department store in Vancouver. Within two years of the marriage, Sheila was born, followed within another two by Catherine, who died the day of her birth; Jenny was born in 1957 and, after a longer interval, Andrea followed in 1966.
    Throughout her domestic life as a young wife and mother, Alice Munro wrote. Before she was married, Munro had published stories in Western’s undergraduate literary magazine,
Folio
, and she had made contact with Robert Weaver, an arts producer at the CBC , who bought and broadcast Munro’s “The Strangers” in October 1951. This was the first of a succession of stories broadcast there, and throughout the 1950s these were complemented by magazine publication in
Mayfair
, the
Canadian Forum, Queen’s Quarterly, Chatelaine
, and the
Tamarack Review
. The 1960s saw more commercial and little magazinepublication, with the
Montrealer
emerging then as Munro’s most frequent venue, and the possibility of a book gradually became real.
Dance of the Happy Shades
was published by Ryerson Press in 1968, winning Munro’s first Governor General’s Award and, three years later, in 1971,
Lives of Girls and Women
appeared from McGraw-Hill Ryerson.
    To this point Munro’s writing was solitary, personal, private, something she did not talk about nor, really, much share with Jim Munro, although throughout their years together he remained supportive of her writing. When stories were finished, they went out to be considered for broadcast or publication. They often came back. Throughout most of Munro’s time living in British Columbia, as she later wrote, Robert Weaver was “almost the only person I knew who had anything to do with the world of writing.” This changed as time passed and Munro’s stories continued to appear, but for a long time Weaver – who besides his work at the CBC also held the leading editorial post at the
Tamarack Review
– was, she wrote, “one of the two – or possibly three – people who took my writing seriously.” Yet a writer was what she really was, engaged always in a “wooing of distant parts of” herself, as one of her narrators characterizes the process. That was her “real work.” Yet to the world, she was a housewife and a mother. After Jim quit his job at Eaton’s and the family moved to Victoria to open Munro’s Books in 1963, Alice was known there as the wife of the man who ran the bookstore. Only gradually did the people she knew there learn that Munro wrote – for a long time very few people in Victoria were aware that she had published anything. 2
    But all this changed in the early 1970s when Munro began her “long voyage from the house of marriage” and headed east to Ontario to stay, going home to the place she started out from. To make it easier on the children, Munro’s