Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

especially since moving to Clinton, was not at all sure that she would have material for the one to publish and the other to sell. Recalling this time, and Barber’s offer in particular, Munro has said that
    I was terribly frightened that I was going to be a total disappointment, because at that time I thought I … may never writeanother thing and what I do write will never sell. I just was almost fending off her enthusiasm. I felt so low in hope, and it wasn’t that I was low-spirited, I was fine, I wasn’t depressed, but I just had these ideas. Maybe it’s because I write stories and between every story there’s a kind of break before the next one. That isn’t always true, but that’s the way it was then. And I had entered into this new relationship that had taken a lot of my energy.
    Among Munro’s papers is a single sheet, a list of titles called “Places at Home,” that lists “Pleistocene,” “Airship,” “The Boy Murderer,” and others. In addition, it lists titles later used in
Who Do You Think You Are?
– “Half-a-Grapefruit,” “Privilege,” and “Providence.” There are also other titles that probably represent working titles for stories that ultimately were published in
Who
or had been written by then: “Father” may have been “Royal Beatings”; “Norwegian Lover” may have been “Accident”; and “Simon and Children” may be connected to “Simon’s Luck.” Munro also listed “Married People,” a story that was never published. Though just a single, undated sheet in her hand, it nonetheless confirms the emergence of
Who Do You Think You Are?
from “Places at Home.” Given the imaginative adjustments brought about by her return, Munro took some time finding her way into her next book as she settled in with Fremlin and his mother in Huron County. 8
    When Munro moved to Clinton in August 1975, she and Gerry Fremlin did not see it as a permanent arrangement. She joined in with his plan to look after his mother, hoping to get her situated at home and the house fixed up, before moving elsewhere. Munro remembers saying, on a walk with Fremlin during the summer of 1975, that she did not think she was going to write any more, that she would “find something else to do.” So initially she was not especially concerned with establishing a regular writing routine in Clinton. Such feelings aside, during that autumn Munro struggled with “Places at Home” and, despite her misgivings, found herself beginning a new story that became “Privilege,” the second story in
Who
. Remembering this moment and the uncertainties she then felt, she has mentioned that
    when I came home that time I was interested in something different about the county. When I was in British Columbia, writing about home, it was just like an enchanted land of your childhood. It was very odd to say that Lower Town was the enchanted land, but it was. It was sort of out of time and place. And then when I came back I saw this was all happening in a sociological way, and I saw the memories I had as being, in a way, much harsher, though they were never very gentle, actually.
    She was stirred by a “new interest in [these] harsher” memories, and that interest led to the stories she wrote during 1976, among them “Privilege” and “Royal Beatings.”
    During 1976 Munro also worked on a television script, for CBC , entitled “1847: The Irish,” for a series called
The Newcomers/Les arrivants
. She wrote the screenplay, which was revised, and the episode was shot during the summer of 1977. It was broadcast in January 1978. Munro later returned to the material and changed the screenplay into a story, “A Better Place Than Home,” which was published in 1979 in a volume drawn from the entire series. Focusing on an Irish family’s story of emigration to Canada during the Potato Famine exodus, her story was based on research rather than personal materials (her own Irish ancestors having emigrated to Canada well before 1847). A comment she makes in draft notes about the piece catches the effect, and certainty, of her knowledge once she had finished her work for the script: “There can’t be any spectacular ‘Making it’ in the new land because they usually didn’t get that far; they remained mostly working-class, lower middle-class, or proud poor farmers. (Never mind Timothy Eaton).” But her protagonist, who remembers her own difficulties in emigrating to Canada, “speaking in 1900, would see her