Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

the evident British mannerisms of many of them. At these events she was likely to sit quietly and listen while vigorous discussions were going on around her.
    At some point Alice told Cuomo that she wrote, so he offered to look at something of her choice. He did, and though he does not remember that it was “Boys and Girls,” one of the two stories she wrote during her time on Cook Street, he recalls liking it very much. So he “asked her if she would be interested in coming in as a guest andpresenting it to the students” in his advanced creative writing course. (Cuomo has no recollection of Munro volunteering that she had published by then; when he was told, in 2004, of the extent of Munro’s prior publication by 1964 he was astounded.) Cuomo had begun with an introductory course but then had arranged for the better students in the class to do a workshop. This was the class Munro visited, probably in late 1964 or early 1965. Cuomo recalls thinking that it would be good for his students “to be introduced to the work of a mature and significantly more advanced writer. I also felt that it would be encouraging for Alice to have these bright youngsters read and, as I innocently expected, be dutifully impressed by her work.”
    “It was a mistake,” Cuomo now says. “For whatever reason they were highly critical of the story and not the least impressed.” The students were “unduly harsh.” He wonders if they resented an outsider, introduced to them with obvious enthusiasm by their teacher, but as the class progressed he found himself directing the discussion in a way he seldom did, trying to get the students to see what he valued in the story; by the end, he had brought most of them around. “Alice, though, was clearly hurt” despite Cuomo’s attempts to cheer her up afterward. In a draft of an essay written over two decades later, Munro vividly recalled the incident, writing that up to that time, her “almost only contact with writers at the University of Victoria had been limited to a painful session with a man who told me my work reminded him of the kind of thing he himself had been writing when he was fifteen and had abandoned with the first glimmerings of maturity.” This man was Lawrence Russell, one of the undergraduate members of Cuomo’s workshop. Ultimately he became a creative writing professor at Victoria. While Cuomo does not remember Lawrence being especially harsh in that session, no more at least than others, he recalls him as “bright and sharp” and concedes he could be acerbic. When she recounted this incident in her memoir of her mother, Sheila Munro wrote that Lawrence “attacked the story savagely, saying it was something a typical housewife would write.” She also maintains that her mother could not “write anything for about a year after this incident.”
    There is no doubt that her visit to Cuomo’s workshop affected Munro deeply. To this day she recalls Russell’s comments and scoffs at his claim that he has no recollection of it. In fact, remembering it, Munro used the words “savaged” and “destroyed” for what Russell did, but then added, “It was good for me. All those things are good for you. After that I really had great respect for people like Lawrence. But I always thought he might be wrong.” Obviously, he was. For his part, Cuomo offers an explanation that seems to capture Munro’s attitude toward the critical act in some fundamental ways. He called her reaction to his class “delicate” – that is, while she was able, in an impeccable way, to judge her own work – to know what she had done and where it was going, he could also see that at this point she had no experience listening to criticism. She was not used to it and she was not prepared for the give-and-take of a workshop. Munro lacked the “editorial mind” necessary to critique another person’s work and improve it. Whether Cuomo is exactly right, and whether all this could have been seen in just that one session forty years ago, are open questions – perhaps even “open secrets.” But there is no doubt that Munro’s visit to Cuomo’s workshop helped to confirm her lifelong scepticism about the putative teaching of writing. When, between 1973 and 1975 Munro found herself needing to undertake such work in order to finance her independence, and then again for other reasons in the late 1970s and 1980, she did so with considerable embarrassment, not at all believing in the process.