Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

scroll sprinkled with glitter.
    An amber glass cream jug, from Woolworth’s probably, a bunch of flowers in it that a child might have brought – roadside weeds, buttercups, big coarse daisies, white and purple money-musk, even a couple of dandelions.…
    Newspaper photograph of seven coffins in a row. Two large, five small. Father, mother, five little children. All shot by the father in the middle of the night a few years ago in a houseabout five miles out of town. That house is hard to find but many people have persisted, asking directions at a gas station on the highway and then at a crossroads store[.] Many people have driven past.…
    Some blue and yellow paper birds, that look as if they were cut by the wobbly hand of a six-year-old child, but were cut out in fact by Ella herself, with her curled arthritic hands, and strung on little sticks the way it said to do, in the paper. A
mobile
. She made it to have something moving to look at it … and sure enough the birds are bobbing encouragingly, even on so close a day, riding on undetectable currents of air[.] 6
    Munro’s awareness (and perhaps emulation) of Wright Morris’s
The Home Place
is readily apparent here. Following him, she is focusing on materials that, separate and stark, stand out in her mind, each an image embodying a story. But unlike Morris, who took his own photographs depicting such images from his own rural Nebraska childhood, Munro was working with a photographer who, however he might try, did not share her stark vision or her sense of personal story of Huron County. When in January 1975 Munro wrote to Metcalf that she might be doing the book with D’Angelo, she recounted a conversation with the photographer in which she said the text would neither be bland nor suitable for
Reader’s Digest
. It certainly is not: “Places at Home” is both starkly Munro’s own response to her home place, as well as a harbinger of what she would be writing in the years immediately to come. It points the way toward a new-found, sharply defined, and precise use of her material – no longer away from Huron County, Munro began in 1975 to write there with a longer, deeper perspective, one rooted in its soil, expansive, and bent on discovering “the rest of the story” in such images as are found in “Clues” and throughout “Places at Home.”

    When Munro wrote to Gibson at the end of 1975 acknowledging the decision to abandon “Places at Home,” she also said that she was “into a new book, just shaping. I think it will work.” Gibson circulated thisletter to his colleagues with the annotation “I shall write soon with a formal offer to publish.” Since he had met Munro in late 1974, Gibson kept at his suit. He sent her another formal offer for a contract in early February 1976. Meanwhile, he kept in touch, sending her books, asking her to blurb one by Harry Boyle and another by Jack Hodgins. His letters continued through 1976 and, during the spring of 1977, he told her that Macmillan was willing to publish Robert Laidlaw’s novel
The McGregors
. By then
Who Do You Think You Are?
was emerging as a collection. Macmillan, however, still had no contract with her. Having received Gibson’s second “formal offer to publish” in February 1976, Munro wrote back about a month later asking Gibson to send back the manuscript of “Places at Home,” “that unusable text for the photographs.” It was “the only complete ms. of that I’ve got, and I’m thinking of doing something with it,” she told him. Regarding Gibson’s offer to publish, she thanks him for his “kind words” and leaves it at that. He returned the manuscript a few days later, commenting that “there’s a lot of good stuff in there” that he hopes she can put “to good use.” 7
    While it might be possible to see Munro’s behaviour as coy in the face of Gibson’s protracted wooing, such an interpretation assumes a certainty about her ongoing writing that, though quite clear in retrospect, was by no means clear to Munro herself at the time. Gibson’s continuing suit between late 1974 and spring 1978 – when he finally secured a contract with Munro for Macmillan – served as foundation for the working relationship that was formalized then and has been sustained ever since.
    In March 1976 a second wooing began, that pressed by Virginia Barber. In each instance, though, editor and agent were after an author who, because of the changes in her life since 1973 and