Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

critical step toward becoming the writer she became over the next thirty years. Writing “Home,” moving back to the mysterious, touchable place she had left behind in 1951, the place that she had recalled, imagined, and detailed in the intervening years from British Columbia, now confronting it anew with its surfaces and depths still there, resonant, Alice Munro had come home.

PART ONE
Everything Here Is Touchable
Ancestors, Parents, Home
    It’s the fact you cherish.
– “What Do You Want to Know For?” (1994)

“Particularly Clear and Important to Me”
Lower Town and Wingham, 1931–1949
    There are few pleasures in writing to equal that of creating your town.… Solitary and meshed, these lives are, buried and celebrated.
– “An Open Letter from Alice Munro” (1974)
    I n 1974, Alice Munro wrote “An Open Letter” for the inaugural issue of
Jubilee
, a short-lived publication from Gorrie, Ontario, a village east of Wingham. Named after Munro’s own fictional town, and carrying on its cover an image of Wingham’s leading civic structures – its post office and town hall –
Jubilee
was a celebration of Munro’s work and the small-town ethos. She initially began using Jubilee as a town name during the 1950s and some references were included in her first book,
Dance of the Happy Shades
, but the town of that name was used most extensively as Del Jordan’s home place in
Lives of Girls and Women
. When in December 1970 Munro sent the manuscript of that book to her Ryerson Press editor, Audrey Coffin, the title she gave it was
Real Life
. In her open letter, she writes: “When I was quite young I got a feeling about Wingham – the town, of course, from which Jubilee has come – which is only possible for a child and an outsider. I was an outsider; I came into town every day to go to school, but I didn’t belong there. So everything seemed a bit foreign, and particularly clear and important to me. Some houses were mean and threatening, some splendid, showing many urban refinements of life. Certain store-fronts, corners, even sections of sidewalk, took on a powerful, not easily defined, significance. It is not too much to say that every block in that town has some sort of emotional atmosphere for me, and from the pressure of this atmosphere came at last the fictional place: Jubilee.”
    Of Munro’s various unused titles,
Real Life
is her most evocative. These two words conclude the “Baptizing” section of
Lives
, where Del achieves her most powerful epiphany – her rejection of Garnet French’s attempt to dominate her – encapsulating that new understanding within herself. But more broadly,
Real Life
defines the essential feeling that Munro creates within and through her fiction: that what a reader reads here is not fiction, that this is real life – these events really happened. Or, at the very least, Munro makes her reader
feel
as if they did. Alluding in her open letter to other mythic towns found in fiction – among them Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Eudora Welty’s Morgana, Mississippi, and Margaret Laurence’s Manawaka, Manitoba – Munro asserts just what she is about in her creation of Jubilee: “There are few pleasures in writing to equal that of creating your town,exploring the pattern of it, feeling all those lives, and streets, and hidden rooms and histories, coming to light, seeing all the ceremonies and attitudes and memories in your power. Solitary and meshed, these lives are, buried and celebrated.” 1
    Real Life
and Munro’s creation of her own town; her remembered feelings as a child in Wingham, feelings of mystery and feelings of threat; her sense of herself as an outsider, a person from Lower Town – each of these characterizations suggests the complexity of her relation with Wingham, and the inextricable connection between her own life and her fiction. From memories of being in Lower Wingham, growing up there amid its curious circumstances, smells, sights, and people, Munro fashioned fictions derived from that “real life.” Alice Munro’s relationship with Lower Wingham and with Wingham, set within the cultural contexts of Huron County, has been deep and continuing throughout her career.
Childhood, Lower Town School, and Family Connections
    That relationship began on July 10, 1931. The next Thursday, the Wingham
Advance-Times
announced the birth: “Laidlaw – In Wingham General Hospital on Friday, July 10th, to Mr. and Mrs. R.E. Laidlaw, a daughter