Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

family’s survival, their modest occupations, as a source of great pride and satisfaction. (I’m sorry, but I think it inevitable with a family of this size, at that time, that some would have gone to the United States and ‘done well’: but one of them is seeking his fortune in the opening of the Canadian West.)” Like “Places at Home,” this writing proved to beuseful later, since some of her later writing from the 1980s on has been based on such research.

    During 1975–76 there was much more to Munro’s life than writing. As her recollection suggests, she faced considerable imaginative change in returning to Huron County, to the people and culture she had been born into and still very much knew as her own. She was concentrating on developing her new relationship with Fremlin, but there were many other connections as well. They were living with his mother, so Munro had to deal once again with familiar gender-based cultural assumptions – as a woman she was expected to look after the housework, despite Fremlin’s willingness to participate, and all the more so since she was not “working.” There was also the fact that she and Fremlin were not married but living together, something that did not sit well with either person’s parent. Munro was seeing her stepmother and father in Wingham then too, and Bob Laidlaw’s heart problems were persisting. His health was in decline.
    Then there was the place itself. Maud Code Porterfield’s funeral in January 1976 was held during a major blizzard. It created considerable difficulty for the family as they returned from the cemetery, reminding Munro of the physical struggle that was part of winter in Huron. But winter had its consolations. She and Fremlin often cross-country skied, and did so at night. On one such occasion Munro remembers coming upon a group of indefinable shapes covered with snow. What were the shapes under the covering? They strained to make out the reality. Ultimately, they realized that they were looking at wrecked cars strewn about a field. That haunted moment later became the basis for the same realization in her story “Fits,” a story rejected by the
New Yorker
(three times), but first published in
Grand Street
, and ultimately included in
The Progress of Love
. This rooting of “Fits” – a story that is primarily about the imaginative effects of a proximate murder-suicide – in an evening cross-country outing with Fremlin suggests the progress at work in Munro after she moved back to Huron County: once the“enchanted place of her childhood,” Munro now found in Clinton a place equal to her mature imagination, a place familiar yet mysterious. Seeing it anew upon her return she found in its mysteries and suggestions the very stuff of life itself. Despite her characteristic uncertainties, new stories soon emerged. 9
“I Wonder If You’ve Considered a Literary Agent?”: Virginia Barber
    The foreword Hugh Garner had submitted to Ryerson for
Dance of the Happy Shades
in 1968 included two paragraphs describing the market for short stories in Canada during the late 1960s. Though Audrey Coffin excised them from the published version, they reveal what Munro confronted as a short story writer in Canada:
    The commercial magazine used to be the natural home of the short story, but today only one national consumer magazine,
Chatelaine
, remains as a market for classic short fiction.
Canadian Home Journal, Liberty, National Home Monthly
, and
Mayfair
died,
The Star Weekly, Maclean’s
, and
The Montreal Standard’s
successor
Weekend
gave up short fiction. Only one,
Saturday Night
, publishes a couple of short stories a year, as part of a commercial deal with a tobacco company. Today’s apprentice short story writer must rely on the quarterlies such as
Tamarack Review
, the college quarterlies,
Canadian Forum
, and other low- and non-paying publications.
    Munro knew this market vividly from her experiences throughout the 1950s and 1960s and, as Kiil’s placement of four of her stories in
McCall’s
(plus another in
Chatelaine)
during 1973–74 demonstrated, she also knew that her work appealed to well-paying consumer magazines in the United States. But despite submitting stories to these magazines since the late 1950s, and having Kiil do so during the time she was successful with
McCall’s
, Munro had not been able to succeedwith the
New Yorker
, the premier venue for short fiction in North America, nor with its competitors there.
    All