Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

are descriptive while others feature characters and actions. Here is the first paragraph of “Places at Home”:
    This country doesn’t arrange itself into scenery very readily. Sometimes it will. Sometimes a river valley, everything melodious, the hills and willows and water and the dark cedar bush so cunningly fitted together, no drab edges or dead elms or gravel pits to be seen. But usually not. There is not much call for those places on the highway, where people can step out and give their attention to the view. Some of the country is flat, not plate-flat, not stunningly flat, to show off the sky. No sweeping horizons. Some of it is hilly; but as soon as it starts to get dramatic, with long bold sweeps and rugged knobs, it forgets what it was doing, dwindles into rubbly fields, bumps and bogs. You have to take it as it you find it. Fields and bush and swamps and stones. Rail fences, wire fences, electric fences. Log barns, weathered frame barns, new shiny barns with silos like big deodorant cans. Blooming hawthorn and rusting cars, pick-up trucks with the insides torn out, junk and wildflowers. Open and hidden country, fertile and scrubby. Cleared and tilled for a long time now, wasted and possessed. People who have lived away can complain here that they miss the mountains, miss the seashore, miss the calm distances, the space. But if you leave here and live away, what can you say you miss? Hard to describe.
    The next paragraph summarizes the look of the towns, noting especially the post offices (“The old Post Offices had towers, though no Post Office needs one”). At a page long, this piece is representative of what Munro was doing in “Places at Home.”
    It is followed by “Pleistocene,” which concerns a scene in a school classroom where “On an ordinary chalked map of Southern Ontario” a teacher named Mr. Cleaver “drew the lakes of former times, the old abandoned shores. Lake Iroquois and Lake Arkora. The Champlain Sea. The Tara Sands. Names [the students] had never heard before, andwere not likely to remember.” Introducing the students at this point, Munro uses them subsequently. They are resistant to this teacher’s demands, concerned with more pressing things, as Munro makes clear when she concludes: “Winter afternoons swollen with boredom, secrecy, schemes, expectations, and unfocused fearfulness, messages of sex. Spreading, flattening.” “Pleistocene” is followed by a short vignette called “Little Hill” in which, out for a drive years later with her husband, brother, and sister-in-law, Shirley Pickering “did remember one thing that Mr. Cleaver had told them. It was about the drumlins, left by the retreating ice like pebble tracks, to show the way it had gone. She remembered what it meant:
little hill.”
When she remarks this while on the drive, her relatives are taken aback: “Convicted of showing-off,” displaying this useless bit of knowledge, Shirley “turned her face to the window,” holds on to her thoughts, which sustain, cherish, and expand these meanings, and keeps her mouth shut. “She was not so far gone as to make mention” of her other thoughts.
    “Little Hill” is followed by another half-page vignette called “Airship Over Michigan,” which concerns some old men, “sitting on the bench in front of the Town Hall, [who were] receptive to the idea that what looked like a star in the western sky … was in reality an airship hovering over Bay City, Michigan, lit up by ten thousand electric light bulbs.” This view became so widespread that the editor of the paper felt compelled to assert that “this brightest decoration of the western sky was no airship, or any man-made wonder, but the planet Venus.… Not everyone was persuaded.”
    When Munro came to publish
Who Do You Think You Are?
in 1978, some reviewers complained that she had returned to much the same material seen in
Lives
. That complaint misses the essence of what Munro did in
Who
, but there is no question that the text of “Places at Home” recollects Del’s realization in “Epilogue: The Photographer”: “No list could hold what I wanted, for what I wanted was every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together – radiant, everlasting.” Rather like Uncle Craig – whom Del is reacting against here – Munro includes lists in “Places at Home”:a list of nicknames in one