Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

the buying process.”
    Another person who got to know the Munros through the bookstore during its early years was George Cuomo, a writer who taught English at the University of Victoria. He recalls Munro’s as “the best bookstore in town at the time” and, through the store, he and his wifegot to know Alice and Jim “quite well. I remember them as pleasant and friendly, and somewhat shy. Alice was lively and animated and full of laughter in small comfortable gatherings and while working in the bookstore.” Cuomo particularly remembers what he calls Alice’s “sweet kindness to our children.” The Cuomos used to allow their two oldest children – then eight or nine – to take the bus downtown alone. If anything were to go wrong, though, or if they lost their return fare, they were to go straight to the bookstore and ask Alice for help. Cuomo thinks they did so once or twice, “and to this day they recall the Alice they knew then with warm good feelings.”
    In contrast to Vancouver, Victoria was much more to Munro’s liking. Again, her notebook draft fragment about the move provides detail:
    Victoria, that summer, seemed to me a town out of the past. I don’t mean that past the tourist parts of the town tried to evoke – an uncertain rather amazing discouraging hodge podge of Tudor and Victorian pretensions, but a past of settled neighbourhoods, shade trees, corner grocery-stores with striped awnings. In the mountainside suburb of Vancouver where we had lived there were no sidewalks, the trees were fir and cedar, behind the nine-foot laurel hedges there was a jungle splendor and the ditches ran full beside the road. Raw handsome houses, a rain-washed luxuriance. Victoria seemed, by contrast, dry and open and orderly and half-familiar, with a field of dry grass sloping up from the sea, the deep shade of the chestnut trees on the street where we lived[.] I could walk from our house to the store. 17
“I’ve Almost Forgotten I Am a Writer”:
Earle Toppings, Ryerson, and Making
Dance of the Happy Shades
    In November of 1964, writing on Munro’s Bookstore stationery, Munro responded to a letter from Earle Toppings at Ryerson. She began by thanking him for his letter and ended by encouraging him to visitthem, noting, “We’re very proud of the store.” In between she wrote, “I’ve almost forgotten I am a writer so it’s nice to be reminded. I am still working at it though. I quit entirely the first year we had the store but I began again last September or October.” Toppings replied immediately, “For some time I’d been afraid you weren’t writing; it is great to know that you
are
again.” He hoped to make the trip over to Victoria to see them and continues, “With a talent as genuine as yours you must not stop working; but then, a born writer never really ceases.” He concludes, “You know how positively we have always felt about your manuscript of stories. I got it out of the vault again a few days ago and will reread it to touch up my original impressions. During the B C trip we can discuss the possibility of adding to the present MS.”
    This exchange of letters – Toppings was unable to get to Victoria as hoped – began a period during which he, as senior editor for trade books, tried to rekindle the project of publishing a collection of Munro’s stories at Ryerson. The decision was a long time coming since the book was not agreed on until March 1967. In the meantime Toppings stayed in touch with Munro both about the collection and about Munro’s contribution to the
Modern Canadian Stories
collection that he was working on at the time. The contact was sporadic. Toppings remembers that during this time “it was hard to get a letter from her,” while Munro admits that she has never been much of a letter writer. The manuscript of the six stories Weaver had handed to Colombo in late 1961 thus remained in the Ryerson vault. It was augmented between 1961 and 1967 by new stories from the
Montrealer
and, in the case of “The Shining Houses,” from
CBC Wednesday Night
. Two stories that had been omitted from the Colombo group, “The Day of the Butterfly” and “Thanks for the Ride,” were also added. Toppings recalls that they would have a published story in hand and then write to Munro, who would send a typescript version. In this way, the original manuscript grew to twelve stories by the time Ryerson decided to go ahead with the collection.
    During the three years Munro was on