Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

gutters. They sang at their work and talked abusively and intimately to the turkey carcasses. ‘Don’t you nick me, you old bugger!’ ‘Aren’t you the old shit factory!’ ” Munro had inserted “shit factory” on the proof and McGrath commented, “I’m still negotiating this!” He lost, since the phrase ran (and was retained in the book) as “crap factory.”
    The
New Yorker’s
famous checking department is in evidence here also. At the point when the narrator is describing herself gutting a turkey, someone from checking commented, “Normally most of the connecting tissues are pulled out of the rear end of the turkey, not by the neck route.” Equally, the proof has numerous suggested changes, mostly punctuational or grammatical, from Shawn. Each one is initialled. When, at one point, Munro was pushing to have a character, Brian, say “Fuckin’ boats, I got outa that,” Shawn has placed a question mark and initialled it. As McGrath said, he was unyielding. Munro had her own way in the book version. On this galley too, there is a request from the legal department first for Munro’s assurances that none of these characters resembles “actual people still living” and secondly if the town in the story is recognizable. Because of legal problems the magazine was then having, before the story ran, Munro had to telegraph the legal department other assurances from Australia. McGrathwas quite apologetic about this and undertook to pay the costs involved.
    Ending his final letter about “The Turkey Season,” McGrath effused, “I
really
love this story, and I’m extremely proud of how it turned out. I’m also delighted that it’s running in the Christmas issue, because I think of it as a present to our readers.” 10 He now recalls this collaboration as one of
the
moments in his work with Munro, and he concedes that his own combination of the two versions of the story fuels his pleasure. Even though most of Munro’s stories have scarcely needed such extensive reorganization, what McGrath did with “The Turkey Season” should be seen as indicative of the role of the
New Yorker
in Munro’s development. This arrangement not only continued but it increased. Both
Moons
and
The Progress of Love
included five stories that had been first published in the magazine, and those that were not had been considered under the first-reading agreement. In
Friend of My Youth
, eight of ten had appeared in the
New Yorker
, in
Open Secrets
seven of eight. Not all the stories in the last three collections were published previously, but in each case five stories, or most, first saw print in the
New Yorker
. Thus from
The Moons of Jupiter
on, the editors at the magazine have played an important role in Munro’s career, serving along with Virginia Barber as her first response: questioning, pressing, suggesting so as to improve her stories and showcase them in the
New Yorker’s
pages. There have been some difficulties along the way, to be sure, but there is no question as to the magazine’s importance to Munro’s career.

    The Moons of Jupiter
, meanwhile, was taking shape. An undated list in Munro’s hand of fourteen titles, the bulk of those in the volume, shows her attempting to pull the collection together: “Dulse” and “Bardon Bus” are marked “rewrite”; “Labor Day Dinner,” “Wood,” “The Turkey Season,” and “Ferguson Girls” are satisfactory (though the latter turned out not to be and still is not); and the others need only “slight” revision. “Working for a Living” is listed but gets no comment. The rewrite of “Dulse” has been described, but that of “Bardon Bus” is notable in that Munro’s incessant revision resulted in a second separate version ofthe story, one that jockeyed with the earlier version to be the one printed. Munro seems to have been inclined all along to exclude “The Ferguson Girls,” her decision to allow it to be published in
Grand Street
notwithstanding. In addition to the
New Yorker, Redbook, McCall’s
, and
Harper’s
each passed on it. Since she did not think that it fit with the other stories, “Wood” was also out. Once she had done her revising – Munro delivered the new “Dulse” to Gibson herself – and having agreed on a lineup with her agent, Barber submitted
The Moons of Jupiter and Other Stories
to Macmillan in mid-March 1982 and sent it to England – to Allen Lane and Penguin, which were coordinating editions there – at the same