Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

Toronto taught at York and, knowing of Munro’s situation, had suggested her as a possible teacher. So just a month after leaving Nelson, Munro was back in Ontario, looking to set up a household for herself and Jenny. Andrea would remain in Victoria with Jim, her school, and her friends. Instead of Toronto, however, Munro decided to return to London – it was a smaller city, a place she knew, closer to Wingham, and cheaper than Toronto – and commute to York once a week by train. 12
    Munro found a one-bedroom apartment at 383 Princess Avenue in London, settled into it with Jenny, and began her commute into York on Thursdays. While she enjoyed being in Toronto weekly and seeing friends there, Munro took an almost instant dislike to York and to her teaching assignment there. She found the university a frightful place and thought her work there ineffectual at best, fraudulent at worst. Within a month of beginning, and even having lost one class meeting to the Jewish holy days, she was thinking about quitting. Munro harboured that thought until she did quit early in 1974, citing her healthas her primary reason; while she was treated for anemia in late 1973, her feelings over her own inability as a teacher and even the efficacy of the process itself were very important to her decision. During her time at York, though, Munro met and began mentoring Mary Swan, a young writer then in her final year. Swan sought Munro out to see whether she should keep at her writing and, at one point, asked if she should join Munro’s class. Knowing that Swan had talent as a writer, Munro said “something like ‘Not in a million years,’ ” Swan recalls, and told her to stay away from the class. (Munro’s version: “I said, don’t come into my class, they’ll eat you alive, they’re no good anyway.”) Munro offered to continue to meet one-on-one. They did, and also kept meeting the next year in London when Munro was writer-in-residence at Western. 13
    Living in London, Munro was close enough to Wingham to continue seeing her father on a regular basis. She had begun to visit him during the summer of 1972 when she was living in Toronto. He was suffering from heart problems, so in addition to her concerns over Andrea in Victoria, Munro also had to cope with her father’s declining health. Over Thanksgiving Bob Laidlaw became very sick and had to be hospitalized. There on the farm in Wingham, Munro found herself looking after things, coping with her stepmother, even spreading hay in the sheep yard, feeling that the life she had lived since leaving Wingham had all been something of a dream. This experience became the basis for “Home,” a story she wrote immediately after Thanksgiving (October 8) as a birthday present for John Metcalf. She sent him the second draft, called “Notes for a Work”; it is dated October 30, 1973, and dedicated to him “with love.” 14
    As she settled into London, a place she liked well enough but not one where she expected to stay long-term, Munro began to develop local connections and friends. She saw something of Margaret Laurence, who was writer-in-residence at Western during the fall 1973 term, connected with people in the English Department at Western, and also reconnected with her sister-in-law, Margaret Munro, who lived in London, had also divorced, and was going back to school. Through MargaretMunro she later went to a party where she met people who were avowed Communists – they served as the basis of a story, “Gold,” which is one of the few Munro finished to her own satisfaction and submitted but never sold. Andrea was her most pressing concern, though, so Munro went to Victoria in November to see her, and then went back again for Christmas. Earlier that month she had gone to Ottawa for the founding meeting of the Writers’ Union and saw Metcalf there.
    Throughout the fall of 1973 too, Munro was writing, worrying about the stories and the shape of
Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You
. She wrote “The Ottawa Valley,” the last one written for the collection and something of a coda, a farewell to fiction, late that year. Owing to its depiction of her father’s situation and precise, unflattering detail it contains about her stepmother, she kept “Home” out of the collection, placing it instead in
New Canadian Stories
, an annual anthology of new work published by Oberon. She thought there was little chance either would see it there. During the fall she had signed the