Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

the family, who seem to have been story-tellers since theMiddle Ages. I know people going on about their families can be very tiresome but maybe I can do something unexpected with it.
    Faced with these musings from Munro, it makes sense to take her back again to the 1970s, to the productive decade that began in Victoria with the rapid composition of
Lives of Girls and Women
and ended with her back living in Huron County and writing – among other things – “Working for a Living,” the long memoir she refers to here. That decade saw her returning to, reshaping, and revising some of her writings from the 1950s and ’60s to help make
Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You
. Then too she took up once more – but now that she was back in Ontario, differently – the remnants of her family inheritances she found there in such pieces as “Home,” “Winter Wind,” and most especially and significantly, “The Ottawa Valley,” for that 1974 collection as well. Just as that book was published, in an essay she effectively co-wrote with her father (who had given her most of the factual information it contains), Munro proclaimed that the stretch of the Maitland River flowing by their farm in Lower Wingham is for her a place where “everything is touchable and mysterious.” This rediscovery of Huron County as her home place led to Munro’s abandoned 1974–75 photo-text, “Places at Home,” and it led ultimately to what remains the single most important book in her
oeuvre
– at least as regards her development as a writer –
Who Do You Think You Are? / The Beggar Maid
. After 1973 as well Munro was a daughter returned home who was able to talk over, read, and appreciate her father’s own emerging gifts as a writer during his last years after a lifetime of hard physical labour. All of this sets the stage for Munro’s shaping of
The View from Castle Rock
.
    Every August, on “Medal Day,” the famed MacDowell artists’ colony outside Peterborough, New Hampshire throws open its grounds to the public – the only day in the year it does so – in order to present the Edward MacDowell Medal for an outstanding contribution to the arts. On August 13, 2006, its forty-seventh recipient was Alice Munro. Receiving the award, Munro offered gracious and detailed thanks to Robert Weaver and to Virginia Barber, to her editors, and to both ofher husbands, “men who believed that a woman doing really serious work, not just amusing herself, was possible. In my generation those men were not that easy to find, and the fact that I nabbed two of them is certainly lucky.” But while the centrepiece of the day’s program was Munro herself, the most extended presentation was by Virginia Barber, who offered a warm, detailed, and heartfelt reminiscence of her relations with Alice Munro alongside a clear-sighted and sharp analysis of the intimacies Munro’s stories offer readers, “the stuff of a magical alchemy.” Barber also said this:
    I’ve also learned that nearly every time Alice completes a book she opines that it will be her last. She used up all of her materials; she has nothing to say. After the publication of
Runaway
in 2004, she said the same sort of thing, and this time I suggested she write a non-fiction book about her Laidlaw ancestors – material she’s been interested in since we met. But in spite of the extraordinary number of letters, diaries, journals, printed material reaching back to the 1700s in Scotland, non-fiction wasn’t satisfying. How could she fill the historical gaps? But even more, what did they look like? What did they say to one another? What were they feeling? So, we quickly agree: Turn it into stories. And that material is the first hundred or so pages in her new book,
The View from Castle Rock
, which will be out in November.
    Here Barber confirms Munro’s “family book” as dating back to the critical 1974–76 period of her career (the two met in mid-1976 at a Writers’ Union of Canada meeting in Toronto); here too she also reconfirms Munro’s habit of predicting that her latest book will be her last. 8
    While modest uncertainty over her work – irrespective of what her readers said and wrote – has characterized Munro’s own sense of her trajectory as a writer, this public airing of such misgivings should be seen as an appropriate preliminary to
The View from Castle Rock
. Even though inspired by Maxwell’s
Ancestors
and by the whole of his
oeuvre
, and having for well over