Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

December 1972 to “lay the foundations” for a union. It would be “a truly professional organization which would help and protect us in relation to contracts, royalties, permissions, foreign rights, TV and film rights, and publicity.” Munro attended this first meeting. She also went to another held in June 1973 in Toronto, as well as to the union’s founding meeting in Ottawa in November. The Writers’ Union was a necessary step in the professionalization of writing in Canada, one that grew directly out of the controversy over McGraw-Hill’s purchase of Ryerson, the Ontario Royal Commission on Publishing in Canada, and the nationalist concerns of the early 1970s. The union was created, by coincidence, just as Munro was getting out of her marriage and was setting her energies more directly toward writing as a profession. It became very much a part of her identity as a writer then, and so it has remained. At the first meeting, she became a member of an eight-person membership committee. In her letters to Metcalf about it, she suggested possible writers from British Columbia, offering a list of about twenty. She advocated opening membership to anyone who had published a book. Metcalfwas tentative on this point, as were others, trying apparently to differentiate between writers of quality and those whose work did not meet that stipulation. Throughout this debate, Munro thought the very notion of any such differentiation was impossible, if not ludicrous, although she continued to be interested in knowing what the arguments in favour of such elitism were. 10
    Seeing each other through their work together on the Writers’ Union, sharing both interests and similar personal situations, and finding one another mutually attractive, Munro and Metcalf had a romantic relationship that began in mid-1973 and continued into 1974. Munro spent that summer in Montreal and, after that, they broke up. Her connections to Metcalf were most significant in relation to Munro’s departure from married life but, even so, they continued and were maintained after they ended their romantic involvement. During the early 1970s Metcalf was a significant lifeline for Munro, connecting her to the world of writing in much the same way as Robert Weaver had during the 1950s and 1960s.
    For his part, Metcalf was still very much involved in the making of Canadian writing during the early 1970s – Margaret Atwood remembers him as a delight, “the life of the party.… He was absolutely funny and very verbal and very there and very connected.” A moving force behind “The Montreal Storytellers,” an initiative to bring writing into schools and other public spaces; teacher; author of five books; writer-in-residence at New Brunswick, Ottawa, and Loyola universities; and recipient of two Canada Council Senior Arts Grants during the 1970s, Metcalf seemed senior to Munro during the time they were together. He was a person to both confide in and learn from. But owing to his penchant for polemic attacks on other Canadian writers and on the writing culture in Canada that began during the 1970s, he was also a writer whom she quickly surpassed – she did so with
Lives
.
    While her relationship with Metcalf was developing, and while they worked with other writers in the union, Munro was still trying to leave Victoria for good. She needed something that would take her elsewhere. Over the winter of 1972–73, working on the stories that became
Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You
, she pursued an opportunity toteach a summer course in creative writing at Notre Dame University in Nelson, British Columbia. A small university in the Kootenay region in the southeastern portion of the province, Notre Dame was well away from Victoria and indeed from just about anyplace else. She accepted the job in March. It involved teaching the second half of an English class, the creative writing portion (the first half was taught by a visiting instructor from the University of British Columbia). The class met for two hours daily from July 23 to August 17. Her stipend was $425, and she was also given a three-room apartment from July 1 to August 18, plus a travel allowance of $70. 11
    In the Calgary archives there are numerous fragment versions of a story called “Creative Writing,” which drew specifically on this experience and was probably written about the same time. Most versions are written from the point of view of a character in Munro’s situation, though some