Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

followed Munro’s also featured two of his poems. Given this presence in
Folio
, Alice Laidlaw thought during her first year to bring her initial submission to the magazine to Fremlin directly. She hoped, as she has said, that he would immediately fall for her. He did not. Instead, hesent her down the hall to the actual editor, who eventually accepted her story for publication.
    The contributor’s note in that issue of
Folio
refers to Munro as an “eighteen-year-old freshette, whose story in this issue is her first published material. Graduate of Wingham High School. Overly modest about her talents, but hopes to write the Great Canadian Novel some day.” As with Mary Ross’s “Prophet’s Address” in Wingham, this note confirms Munro’s very clear, and very serious, commitment to her writing. Even during Munro’s first year at Western, people who knew the magazine were talking about Alice Laidlaw as
Folio’s
“find.” Such was her evident potential. 1
    Folio
published two more stories by Alice Laidlaw during her time at university, but by the spring of 1951 she was in correspondence with Robert Weaver at the CBC about her submissions to a radio program called
Canadian Short Stories
. In May he wrote to her requesting revisions to a story called “The Strangers” and, once she had made them, he bought the story for fifty dollars. Initially slated for broadcast on June 1, the story was preempted by the release that day of the Massey Commission report on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences – an ironic coincidence given Munro’s subsequent reputation. “The Strangers” was ultimately broadcast on October 5 during the first broadcast of the fall schedule. Weaver, who championed Canadian writing and Canadian writers through the CBC from the late 1940s on, and through the
Tamarack Review
from the 1950s through the 1980s, was to be among
the
critical people in Alice Munro’s career, the one person she knew from the larger world of writing who helped to sustain her through her first two decades of serious writing. During the 1950s, Munro submitted fourteen stories to Weaver, some accepted and broadcast, others rejected. Throughout, he encouraged, helped, supported, and made suggestions. With Weaver’s encouragement, Munro started sending her stories to magazines. The first story she sold for publication appeared in the Canadian magazine
Mayfair
in November 1953; it was followed during the decade by contributions to the
Canadian Forum, Queen’s Quarterly, Chatelaine
(which had rejectedMunro’s submitted poems during her teenage years) and, in its second issue, the
Tamarack Review
.
    During the spring of 1952 when Weaver was about to broadcast the second story he had bought from Laidlaw – “The Liberation” – he received a letter from the author. Then living at 1316 Arbutus Street, Vancouver, she writes, “I don’t like to bother you about this, but I wonder if it would be too much trouble to give my new name and address when the author’s name is mentioned. I have been married since the story’s acceptance; my name now is Alice Munro, and I am living in Vancouver.” When the story was broadcast on June 13, however, Munro was still identified as “Alice Laidlaw” “of London Ontario.” 2 She was, of course and a bit perversely, both persons – for, though she had left Wingham and London and Ontario and would only visit there during the next twenty years, she was still and would continue to be “from” Ontario. In ways she most probably did not intend when she wrote to Robert Weaver in May of 1952, her name really
was
“Alice Munro” – she was living in Vancouver, imagining Ontario.
“The Twin Choices of My Life”:
University of Western Ontario, 1949–1951
    Founded in 1878, the University of Western Ontario served in 1949 as the regional university in southwestern Ontario just as, in the east, Queen’s University fulfilled a similar role for that part of the province. The University of Toronto, by contrast, liked to cast itself as the provincial institution and also, in many ways, the national university. When Munro arrived in London in the fall of 1949, Western enrolled over four thousand students in all of its programs and associated colleges; about half that number would have been undergraduates in the university itself. At the time, Western was reaching the end of a post-war influx of veterans that had taxed its capacities; during 1946–47, for example,