Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

Munro was feted at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, where she received the O. Henry Award for Continuing Achievement in Short Fiction. There, Munro gave a talk, “Stories,” which was still on the Knopf website. On Munro’s seventh-first birthday the Alice Munro Literary Garden was dedicated in Wingham. Her name has been mentioned in connection with the Nobel Prize.
    Enjoying all of this to some real extent, though not exactly revelling in it, Munro kept living the life she has lived, back and forth fromClinton to Comox. In March 2001 Munro had to miss a planned dinner with Gibson in Comox to talk about the publishing details of
Hateship
because she ended up in the local emergency room, where they had a brief meeting. A heart problem for which she had been operated on previously flared up again, so she required further surgery in Toronto in October. While she was waiting, Munro worked on older pieces, such as “Home,” “Working for a Living,” and “The Ferguson Girls Must Never Marry” – they yet may reappear in print. Her author’s copies of
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
arrived in Clinton on August 21 but, as of the next day, she had not opened the parcel. (“I was just terribly lacking in confidence. I still am. My new book came yesterday and I hid it.”) One of her daughters, visiting, threatened to stage a public reading unless her mother had a look. 2
The
New Yorker
and
Hateship, Friendship, Loveship, Courtship, Marriage
    Once
The Love of a Good Woman
was completed Munro kept writing, producing stories at a regular rate, sending them on to Barber, who sent them on to the
New Yorker
, which usually bought them. “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” the second story destined for
Hateship
(“Queenie” having been held out of
Love)
, appeared in the
New Yorker
in December 1999, “Nettles” in February 2000. Alice Quinn was Munro’s editor for these, as she had been since Buford had found the space for “The Love of a Good Woman.” After “Nettles,” Quinn continued to edit Munro through “Floating Bridge,” “Post and Beam,” “What Is Remembered,” and “Family Furnishings.” At that point, also the magazine’s poetry editor and having other work to do, Quinn cut back on her editing of fiction. Deborah Treisman, who had joined the
New Yorker
as deputy editor of fiction in 1997, became Munro’s editor for “Comfort” and has been since. When Buford left the fiction department in October 2002, Treisman succeeded him as fiction editor. Born in England of academic parents, Treisman grew up in Vancouver and attended the University of California at Berkeley; before joining themagazine, she worked in publishing in Vancouver and New York, where she was managing editor of
Grand Street
.
    Little archival evidence has been found revealing Menaker’s and Quinn’s approaches to Munro’s stories as they moved from manuscript to publication, but those that reveal Treisman’s work show it as quite consistent with McGrath’s during the late 1970s and into the 1980s. Like his, her comments are always couched as suggestions and, throughout the proofs and letters she wrote to Munro, Treisman explains her rationale in each instance. While they worked together, initially, Buford was a superior presence in the process. Just as Quinn said, his proofs show him to be more intrusively directing. In his set of proofs for “Post and Beam,” for example, Buford writes a message directly to Munro, telling her the story is great but that the fix she had done for the beginning has not worked. Also, he did not like using two names beginning with “l,” Lionel and Lorna. Throughout, he points out issues and probes weak spots, asking questions about characters and their actions. As the
New Yorker
has always done, Buford combines many of Munro’s short paragraphs into longer ones. It fell to Treisman to handle all this, working with Munro to incorporate changes – in her letters, she indicates that they are almost done, although more suggestions from Buford might still appear and need to be dealt with. Getting ready to close “Family Furnishings” in early July 2001, for example, Treisman reports that she has not got Buford’s comments; writing on the ninth, she jokes that he may let Munro be, since it is her birthday. Her proof shows that she has gone over the story with Munro on the telephone; most of her proposed changes are checked as agreeable to Munro, others crossed