Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

States? I have often thought that you might find it useful and interesting to have some comments from editors in the United States, and I am sure that some of the more serious magazines there would at least be interested in reading some of your stories.”
    This letter, written about five years after Munro first made contact with Weaver and more than two after they had met – Weaver had walked up to the North Vancouver house on a very hot day in 1953 – might well be seen as typifying his interest in and support of Munro’s work: an acceptance, compliments, a useful suggestion, and a rejection – in that order. The year before he wrote this letter, Weaver had written a CBC memorandum to Robert Patchell, who worked on literary programs in Vancouver, regarding Munro. Weaver reports and details his Toronto group’s negative readings of Munro’s “Thanks for the Ride” and “The Chesterfield Suite,” but in the final paragraph he addresses a disagreement between those in the CBC in Vancouver and those in Toronto:
    One reason I have been very slow to write you about the stories is that I admire Alice just about as much as you do – after all I did manage to buy what I suspect was the first short story she ever sold – but she also strikes me as the kind of writer who won’t fold up under firm criticism, and I don’t think we need to take stories from her because we are afraid she might otherwise stop writing all together.
    Weaver recalls that there was a feeling among Patchell and others in Vancouver, who had come to know Munro there as something of a local talent, that if the CBC asked too much of her she might “be damaged,” and “might stop writing.” Weaver saw this, then and now, as having something to do with the relation between a regional office and the centre, Toronto – that is, as an instance of Canadian regionalism – but he also thinks it was a real fear about Munro in British Columbia. Obviously, Weaver did not think the caution was justified and, just as obviously, he was right. 37

    Throughout the 1950s, Munro kept writing stories, submitting them to Weaver for broadcast consideration and also sending them to magazines. In 1953 and 1954 a story was published each year and there were two in 1955. Weaver also broadcast two stories during 1954–55. Three Munro stories were published in both 1956 and 1957, and she had another, “The Green April,” broadcast on
Anthology
. Of these latter seven stories, Munro excluded four from
Dance of the Happy Shades
, but the other three – “The Time of Death,” “The Day of the Butterfly,” and “Thanks for the Ride” – were included in that first book when it was published in 1968. During the mid-1950s Munro was producing her first mature work.
    During 1956–57 Munro published three stories in
Chatelaine
. The first of these, “The Chesterfield Suite,” was the one that Weaver rejected, writing to Patchell that though “it could be done quite successfully on radio,” it is “not terribly exciting.” The four people who read her work in Toronto agreed “Alice is a writer who should be encouraged in every possible way” but, for Weaver, “The Chesterfield Suite” and “Thanks for the Ride” were “not really successful.” When he returned the second
Chatelaine
story, “The Day of the Butterfly,” to Munro, Weaver said it was “a pleasant story, but not really as interesting as much of your other work.” But he adds that “it is quite possible you might be able to interest a magazine in this story.” The third story, “The Dangerous One,” appeared in the July 1957
Chatelaine
. In the March 1956 issue, which carried “The Chesterfield Suite” as “HowCould I Do That?”, Munro is described, accompanied by a small photograph, on the masthead page as “a prolific and successful writer. Since she began writing during her student days at the University of Western Ontario, twenty-four-year-old Mrs. Munro has had stories read over the CBC and published in magazines and university journals. Most of them have had a small-town background similar to her own that, until six years ago, was Wingham, Ont. Now she lives in North Vancouver, does part-time work in a library, and cares for a daughter, Sheila, who is, her mother says, ‘wild and merry, contrary and delightful, as only a two-year-old can be.’ ” 38
    Since this brief biography notes that with “How Could I Do That?”, Munro was making “her first appearance in