Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

appeared in
Folio
and the next summer sent her a fan letter praising her work. By then Jim Munro was very much in evidence and everyone at Western knew it. Several years older and a veteran, Fremlin graduated and went to work. But for the fan letter, the two lost touch. Yet listening to Munro’s conversation with Boyle in August 1974 as he drove between Ottawa and Clinton, he could not miss Munro saying at one point, “Even since I’ve come back the past year to live here.”
    Picking up on this comment, Fremlin contacted Munro, and their connection was re-established. Given the elderly Mrs. Fremlin’s situation, the only way the two could have had a relationship was for Alice to go to Clinton, just thirty-five kilometres southwest of Wingham – back to Huron County, back to the people she grew up among and had long written about from British Columbia, back to the place where her father still lived in Wingham.
    Returning home to Ontario in 1973, really returning home to Huron County in 1975, Alice Munro was about to effect a transformation in her writing – one brought on, most certainly, by that homecoming. That transformation, in turn, brought about a coequal change in her writing career: just over a year after the Boyle interview, Munro was writing to Gibson from Clinton, Ontario – he had beenpersuaded to come to London for their meeting and she was working on a Macmillan book project he was editing. Munro worked with Gibson and Macmillan throughout 1975 on the projected book and, though it was never published, that connection brought her next book,
Who Do You Think You Are?
in 1978 to Macmillan, with Gibson as her editor. He remains her editor in Canada, since Munro followed him in 1986 to McClelland & Stewart to inaugurate Douglas Gibson Books with her sixth collection,
The Progress of Love
.
    Though she did not hear the Boyle interview that August day in 1974, Virginia Barber, a New York literary agent seeking new clients in Canada, was by late 1975 planning to approach Alice Munro in the hope of becoming her agent. Munro hired her in 1976. 9 In one of her first acts in that capacity, Barber was able to get Charles McGrath, a young man who had become a fiction editor at the
New Yorker
in January of 1976, to have a look at some of the stories Munro had written since her return home. McGrath and his colleagues in the
New Yorker
fiction department were immediately enraptured: they quickly bought “Royal Beatings” and “The Beggar Maid,” publishing each during 1977. By year’s end, Munro had a right-of-first-refusal contract with the
New Yorker
for 1978, a contract she has renewed each year since. There have been almost fifty Munro stories in the
New Yorker
since those first two. Given such interest, by the end of 1978 Munro also had a book contract in New York from Alfred A. Knopf, the revered publisher of fine literary work.

    When Alice Munro walked into a CBC studio in 1974 to talk to Harry Boyle, she was already, in Mordecai Richler’s sardonic phrase, “World Famous in Canada.” Her long apprenticeship as a writer concluded – her first book awarded a Governor General’s prize, her second becoming a 1970s feminist
cri de coeur
– her return home to Ontario begun, though not fully accomplished, Munro had reached a critical moment as a person, as a family member, and as a writer. Having left her life in British Columbia, having returned to an Ontario recognizably the same, though much changed during her absence, Alice Munro was forty-three years oldand, really, on her own for the first time. What she had been before in each guise would change, yet what she would yet become was not clear. As a result of the Boyle interview broadcast, Munro made contacts that transformed her life and her career. Moving back to Huron County to join Gerald Fremlin, Alice Munro found her material – the people, landscape, culture, and history of her home place – the same, yet, given age, perspective, experience, and understanding, very different. And connecting with Douglas Gibson and Virginia Barber – each of whom saw the real potential of her fiction – Munro found a way to reach a larger audience. She was still what she had always been as a writer: driven, intuitive, always uncertain about her writing, continually trying to improve it, to make it perfect. That is how she wrote. But walking into that CBC studio to talk to Huron County-born and -raised Harry Boyle in August 1974, Alice Munro took a