Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

Shades
were the house’s main choices, although Munro also suggested “Trip to the Coast.” 22
    About the same time, Coffin wrote to Hugh Garner, another Ryerson author of some reputation then, who had volunteered to write a preface to Munro’s book because he knew her stories, liked them, and wanted to help. Given the general wariness about short story collections by little-known writers, Robin Farr, the new editor-in-chief, agreed to the idea. So did Munro. Coffin told Garner that she “was pleased to hear that you have very kindly offered to do a foreword to
Walker Brothers Cowboy
, stories by Alice Munro, which I am editing forRyerson’s fall list.” She expected “one or two more stories from Mrs. Munro at the end of March and shall then hope to go quickly into production.” She hoped to receive his foreword in the near future. Coffin then provided Garner with the scant biographical information she had and copies of some manuscript stories. He had his foreword to her within a week’s time and also voted for
Dance of the Happy Shades
as the better of the two titles. Coffin edited the foreword, excising two paragraphs on the market for short stories in Canada (which Garner suggested as a possible cut), and sent it to him for his approval. She also confirmed to him that she thought
Dance of the Happy Shades: Stories by Alice Munro
would be the title. 23
    In writing to Coffin in April, Munro offers something of a coda on her own approach to fiction: “I don’t see the need for a preface. A foreword is plenty. What can you say about your own work? You don’t really think about why you write a story. You write it, you hope it works, it’s finished. Somebody else can see far better than you can, what it is you’re trying to say.” In the same letter, Munro returned Ryerson’s standard author form and added “some autobiographical stuff on a separate page.” It read:
    I was born and grew up in Wingham, Ontario, attended the University of Western Ontario, married and moved to British Columbia. I have three daughters, aged fifteen, eleven, and two (Sheila, Jenny, Andrea, respectively). My husband owns a bookstore in Victoria, where we live in a big old house with an antique furnace and a garden the tourist buses try not to notice.
    Dance of the Happy Shades: Stories by Alice Munro
with a foreword by Hugh Garner was published by the Ryerson Press in September 1968 in a first edition printing of 2,675. The book is dedicated to Robert E. Laidlaw. Robert Weaver wrote the jacket blurb. Besides the foreword, it contained fifteen stories written between 1953 and 1968. The managing editor sent Hugh Garner his copy on September 24. Alice Munro was launched. 24
“The Wife of the Man Who Ran the Bookstore” Wins the Governor General’s Award
    After they opened the bookstore, the Munros naturally enough came into contact with people connected with the University of Victoria such as George Cuomo and his wife. At the time the city of Victoria was small and quiet; it had a distinctly English quality about it – more English than the English, some said. High tea at the Empress Hotel was a well-known ritual, as it still is. The old-country influence during the early 1960s was widespread. When Munro came to write about opening the bookstore, the paperback lines she remembers are Penguin and Pelican. At the university, and in the English department in particular, the British connection was amplified since many, if not most, of the faculty were Commonwealth or British types, people who had got seconds at Oxford or Cambridge and ended up in this desirable but backwater corner of the colonies. There were also a few Canadians and a few Americans, among the latter Cuomo. He taught American literature and was the first person to offer creative writing at Victoria; in 1963 he published his first novel,
Jack Be Nimble
. Alice and Jim, he recalls, knew “the writing types.” Their bookstore, which Cuomo remembers as the only one in town, was “well-stocked and run in a friendly way by people who liked books.” Alice was frequently there, but Jim was always on hand – he was clearly the dominant figure of the two, then, though both were shy. The Munros socialized with the Cuomos and with others from the university, mostly in dinner gatherings of about ten people, some held at the Munros’. Cuomo recalls that Alice was “somewhat in awe” of the people from the English department, owing to her own lack of a degree and