Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

feature the woman as wife to a husband who is teaching at a college in the mountains for the summer. This is an instance, one of several, in which Munro worked and reworked a situation, writing multiple versions, striving to find an effective way into the material. Here are two representative passages:
    Dorothy teaches creative writing. She is not qualified to teach anything else. This is the summer school session, at a little college in the Kootenay mountains. When Dorothy first arrived there, on the overnight bus from Vancouver, she was met by a boy, or a young man with a fuzzy beard, a fastidious voice, a cold serenity or contemptuous passivity of expression; whatever it was, she had seen it before and it made her nervous. Almost the first thing he said to her was, “We thought we were never going to get anybody for this job.”
    Nellie had not realized the pay was poor. She was rather pleased at the prospect of being paid anything at all. For some reason she hadn’t thought of being at the bottom of a list of people the college would have tried to get, she hadn’t thought of so many people being able to turn down offers, to choose and reject. Sheknew that she wasn’t well-known. She had published one book of stories. She always spoke reluctantly and modestly about her work. Secretly she believed all the flattering things that had ever been said about it and thought the people who had said unflattering things were stupid and affected.
    They [Nellie and Dahlia, the head of the English Department] were heading up a steep hill. The town was built around a mountain lake. “Why did you come?” said Dahlia. “Just out of curiosity?”
    “My husband and I are splitting up,” Nellie said. “I wanted to get away somewhere for a while and it seemed like – I remembered driving through here once and I thought it was a nice place, with the lake –”
    While Munro changed the details of the marriage breakup, the elements of the writer/teacher’s situation remain constant: the people at the college cannot believe anyone would come for the money they paid, she is working in “the smallest, dingiest, and – it is now July – the hottest university in the world,” and she “is delighted” because she “has never had an office or a job before.”
    Munro writes that for Nellie, the first version of writer/teacher, this “was the first job she had held since waitressing in her college days. She was forty-three years old.” While not quite true for Munro, who turned forty-two in Nelson and who had worked in the Vancouver library and in the bookstore since waitressing, it was pretty close. When she went to Nelson she had all three daughters with her, she had her own place, and she knew she was out of her marriage. No longer dependent, she was on her own. She found the teaching difficult because of her shyness but, more than that, as a person who has little belief in such programs Munro felt like a fraud as she was doing it. But there were things happening in Nelson, poetry readings and the like, Sheila worked construction and then on the roads, and Munro was meeting people through the college, which publicized her presence. She was happy that summer. Before going to Nelson, at the June meeting for the Writers’ Union, she had started to break off one relationshipwith a man and, at that meeting and over the summer, she was developing another with Metcalf. So the summer she spent in Nelson proved to Munro that, like her narrator in “Red Dress – 1946,” her new life was possible.
    Once she finished teaching in Nelson on August 17, Munro set about organizing that new life quickly. She went to Toronto for a couple of weeks, staying in a friend’s house and exploring possibilities there. Munro then saw Toronto as a city where she had good friends and felt comfortable, more alive. Nothing materialized, so she returned to Victoria, intending to pack up, find an apartment in Vancouver, and move back there – despite her dislike of that city. Its proximity to Victoria would allow her access to her daughters, especially Andrea. But while she was still in Victoria, packing, Munro received a call from the chair of the English Department at York University asking if she would be willing to take on a course in creative writing, needed on short notice because of overflow enrolment. Thinking it over, finding that Jenny – then sixteen – was willing to come east with her, Munro accepted. The friend she had stayed with in