Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

out as not.
    While some cuts remained a fact of life at the
New Yorker
, there is no evidence of difficulties of the sort surrounding “The Children Stay.” That acknowledged, Treisman knows she has a particular problem with Munro, who is now writing stories that are quite long. Any story is competing against all the non-fiction for space in the magazine, and since most writers working there write non-fiction, Treisman essentially has to negotiate space for longer stories; she has said that after she runs one of Munro’s stories she has to “atone” by following it with asuccession of shorter ones. Even so, there are exceptions. The
New Yorker
looked at “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage” but passed on it largely because of its length; it first appeared in the book. So too “Powers” in
Runaway
. “Hateship” is over fifty pages, “Powers” over sixty. There was just no way, Treisman said about “Powers.”
    When Treisman was appointed fiction editor she was quoted as saying her goal was “to publish the best fiction out there” and as she has done that Munro’s has loomed large, perhaps even the largest. In June 2004 Treisman and her colleagues took the radical step of running three Munro stories – “Chance,” “Soon,” and “Silence,” over thirty thousand words in all – in their summer fiction issue. This just after they had run “Passion” in March and “Runaway” the previous August. The magazine had run more than one story by the same author in a single issue before, but only once or twice. What this confirms, and in a way far more compelling than Tina Brown’s glitzy “buzz”-fiction party in 1994, is Munro’s position as a
New Yorker
writer. Speaking of Munro since she herself arrived at the magazine in 1997, Treisman has said that “the understanding has always been that we’re going to take the story,” although they always ask for changes toward improvement. “But she’s not in a class with most other people.” Recognizing this, Treisman continued: “But it’s not about political stature in the literary world, it’s about the quality of the writing. I didn’t appreciate until I started editing her just how intricately she constructs a story. Reading them, something from page three will come and hit you on page thirty, but you had not registered the matter when you first read page three. When you’re editing, and you might think, ‘Oh that line is sort of odd there; maybe it doesn’t need to be there.’ But you get five pages on and you realize exactly why that line is there. Then you appreciate it.”
    Working closely with Munro on a story, Treisman sees her in the same way her predecessors did: She is a writer who understands the process, knows an editorial improvement when she sees it, and works with her editor. Treisman said that, when going over a proof, Munro will go for pages agreeing to suggestions until, knowing just what she wants, she will refuse one, saying, “Well, I think I want to keep that.” Consistent with the example of the brief addition to “Open Secrets”Munro provided to Gibson, Treisman has said that “if you ask her for something, and you might be imagining something quite – not radical – but you might be thinking of a different ending. In fact, she’ll come back with just three lines, but she will have thought about them so carefully that those three lines will make the difference.” And finally Treisman, given her own Canadian experience, has tended to value Munro’s local resonances: “She is, in the best sense, a regional writer. She’s very, very grounded in the landscape, and in social mores, social exchanges which are vocal. She’s writing about very specific small-town life, which is similar to American small-town life, but it’s not the same.” In passing, too, Treisman commented that she “loves the fact” that Munro and Fremlin do “this drive back and forth every year wandering randomly through different small towns.” 3

    Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
went into production early in 2001. There was little discussion of the ordering of the stories, although “Queenie” and “What Is Remembered” were reversed during the process; the two publishers produced books in their usual fashion, sharing typesetting but printing separately with different dust jackets. For this book’s jacket, Munro and Gibson decided to use
Eve’s Delight
, a colour etching by Sheila