Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

from Wingham to Lower Wingham, walking from town to home, out through Lower Town to the Laidlaw farm by the river. “Home.” Passing by the old fairgrounds now, there are in fact stone pillars that do support a sign, though it says “To the Fallen Heroes of Turnberry Twp.” and no letters are missing – there is no grandstand. “There is always a starting point in reality.”
    A draft of “Everything Here Is Touchable and Mysterious” begins nearby, describing the river, and offers a confession:
    I always call this river the Wawanash, when I write about [it] in stories. That is just because I like the name. There is no real Wawanash river, no Wawanash county. There are two townships, East and West Wawanash, in northern Huron County. The river’s name is really the Maitland. It rises at Flesherton and flows into Lake Huron at Goderich. West of Wingham it flows through what used to be, and maybe still is, called Lower Town (pronounced Loretown) and passed my father’s land and Cruikshank’s farm and loops up, in what is known as the Big Bend, before flowing south under Zetland bridge.
    Some of this was in the published essay, but after the final phrase here Munro added “and that is the mile or so I know of it.” This mile or so along the river, like Munro’s recurring walk down “the Flats Road,” became the scene of remembering, in early stories like “Images” or more recently in “The Love of a Good Woman” or “Nettles.” Or as apoint of comparison as Munro recalls first looking at Ettrick Water in “No Advantages” as she begins
The View from Castle Rock
, the family book in which she writes herself, her inheritances, her
own
lives. “This ordinary place” has been so much more than sufficient for Alice Munro: that mile or so along the Maitland has been a place where, truly, everything is touchable and mysterious. “Until she came along,” James Reaney once wrote of Munro, southwestern Ontario “had no voice – she gave it a voice and that has made such a difference. I don’t know what we’d have done without her.” 1 Sad with the sadness of life, Alice Munro, writing her lives in Huron County, the home place that is hers alone. Our Alice Munro, writing on …

Acknowledgements
    Though such things are hard to place exactly, this book probably had its beginning sometime in the 1970s. After graduating university in 1973, I took a year off to work, read, get married, and figure out what I was going to do next. One of the possibilities was to go to Canada for graduate school to study Canadian literature, so I began a subscription to the
Tamarack Review
. As it happened, the first piece in the first issue I received was Alice Munro’s “Material.” After reading it, I decided that if this is Canadian literature, sign me up. I signed, moving to the University of Waterloo where it was my excellent fortune to study with Stanley E. McMullin – I kept reading Munro and he encouraged me to write an M.A. thesis on her early stories and
Dance of the Happy Shades
. Though some in the English department thought it premature – Munro had just three books at the time – the project was approved and completed. By then I was hooked. Like Mr. Stanley on Cather in “Dulse,” “I read and reread” Munro “and my admiration grows. It simply grows.” 1
    I then went off to the University of Manitoba for a Ph.D. There I had more excellent fortune to become the late Evelyn J. Hinz’s first doctoral student and to work closely with John J. Teunissen – together, they modelled a scholarly teaching life for which I remain profoundly grateful. Though my work there was focused on other matters, I went from Manitoba during those years to give my first conference papers, one of which drew from my thesis on Munro. It eventually appeared in
Probable Fictions
. By then I had returned to the States to teach Canadian literature,and Munro’s fiction remained a primary, and continuing, critical focus.
    Working on the annotated bibliography of Munro for ECW Press in 1983, I had occasion to meet Alice Munro to ask some related questions. After saying hello, she looked me straight in the eye and said, with a clarity that still rings, “I’m not dead yet.” I saw her for a day five years later when we both attended Trent University’s tribute to Margaret Laurence and once, in between, we talked on the phone about “Dulse” and Cather’s presence there. As a critic, I thought Munro should simply be left