Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

soon.” He adds, “I am sure that you realize that we are very much interested in the work you are doing and I hope that we are able to use one or two of your stories in the Canadian Short Stories series this winter.” Weaver’s concluding paragraph is as follows:
    Once or twice I have wondered whether you have ever sent any of your stories to one or two of the better Canadian magazines. While you wouldn’t receive any payment from either
Northern Review
or the
Canadian Forum
it might be helpful to you if either magazine published one of your stories and the editors might also send you some useful comments. I mentioned your work to John Sutherland of
Northern Review
and I know that he would be most interested in hearing from you. 19
    Munro did not have another story broadcast on the CBC until “The Idyllic Summer” was used on
Anthology
in 1954. In August of the same year, that story appeared in the
Canadian Forum
. By then, Munro had already sold her first story for commercial publication – “A Basket of Strawberries” to
Mayfair
, which ran it in their November 1953 issue. She did sell a story, “Magdalene,” to John Sutherland at the
Northern Review
during the 1950s, but it was never published. Also at Weaver’s suggestion, during the mid-1950s Munro began sending stories tomagazines in the United States – her first submissions to the
New Yorker
date from this time, and she recalls sending stories to little magazines listed in the back of a
Discovery
magazine.
    Thus Munro apparently wasted no time responding to Weaver’s suggestion that she submit to magazines. As “the only person” she knew “from the world of writing,” Robert Weaver was critical to her evolving career. His letters, she has written, “didn’t reprove me for not writing or exhort me to get busy. They reminded me that I was a writer. The most precious encouragement was not in what they said, but in what they took for granted.” For his part, Weaver saw from the first that Alice Laidlaw Munro was “a real writer”: “Alice knew early what she was trying to do – she had a strong will – and she wasn’t to be deflected.” 20
“Three Dark Rooms in Kitsilano”
    A fragment that is probably connected to “Chaddeleys and Flemings” – and thus a product of the late 1970s – begins “We were married during the Christmas holidays and went at once to Vancouver where we were going to live. As we walked through the Vancouver railway station workmen were taking the lights off a huge Christmas tree. Richard had been living in Vancouver since early summer, articling with a law firm, and writing letters to me describing the mountains, the ocean, the great ships that came into port and making confident promises concerning our love and future life.” Obviously, Munro is drawing here, in her usual precise detail, on her own recollected experiences. Once she and Jim had married in December 1951, they took the train from Toronto directly to Vancouver. Another wedding announcement, cited by their daughter Sheila, mentions a wedding trip to Banff, but Munro recalls only that they may have merely stepped off the train and walked around there. The train trip, an adventure in itself, passed for a honeymoon, and they arrived in Vancouver on January 2, 1952. Having been working at Eaton’s since the previous summer, Jim had found an apartment for them. Munro recalls,
    The apartment he had found for us was on Arbutus Street, facing the park, the beach, the water[.] We had half the downstairs of a pink stucco house. Across the front of the house was a glassed in porch, which kept our living room quite dark. There was dark green linoleum on the floor, and a dark red chesterfield and chair, a fireplace with an electric heater and on either side of the fireplace a little window with a tulip of pink and green glass.
    Behind the living room was our bedroom, and beyond that was the kitchen. We shared the bathroom with the people in the other downstairs apartment.
    The house, at 1316 Arbutus, still looks across Kitsilano Beach Park to English Bay and Burrard Inlet beyond. The Munros lived there through the summer of 1952 but had to move in the fall owing to renovations, so they found a place on Argyle Street where they lived into 1953, until they bought their first house in North Vancouver.
    Among the stories in
The Love of a Good Woman
is “Cortes Island,” which begins: “Little bride. I was twenty years old, five feet seven inches tall,