Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

career as she returned to Ontario and redirected her writing and career, finding her way eventually back to Clinton and Huron County. He was a critical connection for her – involving her in his editing projects, encouraging her as a public writer, and working with her in the creation of the Writers’ Union of Canada. In doing so, Metcalf extended Munro’s connections to other writers beyond the happenstance of people who took the initiative to write to her or to visit Munro’s Bookstore in Victoria. Sometime in 1975, Munro talked about a literary agent with Atwood, who suggested her own New York agent, Phoebe Larmore. Though not then taking new clients, Larmore recommended Munro to an associate, Virginia Barber, an agent who was just starting out on her own. Barber followed this suggestion up and contacted Munro. So Munro’s connection with Atwood, like those with Weaver and Metcalf, proved to be critical. 34
    Yet at the time
Dance of the Happy Shades
was being published, Alice Munro was just another of the very small band of Canadian writers of which Atwood speaks. Ryerson, the Canadian publisher most associated with Canadian writing, took several years to decide to do that book, felt compelled to offer Garner’s foreword as imprimatur, and even considered a preface by Munro. She was herself hesitant about a book of stories, but this halting progress to first-book publication was mostly a reflection of the conditions affecting Canadian publishing at the time. Characterized as “the perilous trade” by Roy MacSkimming, Canadian publishing until the 1970s was historically an enterprise of, on the one hand, balancing the firm markets of textbooks and acting as agents for imported foreign writing with the trade publication of writing by Canadians for Canadians on Canadian subjects, a far weaker and so “perilous” market, on the other. Since the 1920s, Ryerson hadpublished Canadian writing and continued to do so while most of its competitors contented themselves with the more lucrative textbook and foreign agency markets through the 1950s. Looking back from the mid-1960s, Macmillan of Canada’s John Gray recalled stating during the 1950s that “the relationship of author and publisher in Canada [lacks] a rational economic basis; that the Canadian author who depended on books for money did not make it from sales in Canada; that the Canadian publisher made none of the net profit of his business from the overall result of his Canadian general publishing.”
    Yet this situation was changing. John G. “Jack” McClelland had returned from his war service and joined his father’s firm, McClelland & Stewart. By the late 1950s, McClelland and Malcolm Ross, general editor of the series, had established the New Canadian Library reprint line of paperbacks and had embarked on the path that would make McClelland & Stewart the preeminent publisher of Canadian writing from the 1960s on. During this time, Macmillan of Canada and other publishers also commissioned and brought out Canadian books, as attitudes about Canadian writing began to change and nationalism rose. Yet as MacSkimming makes clear, the publishing of Canada’s writers was quite economically perilous throughout the twentieth century. The economics of publishing in English to a potential audience of about two-thirds of Canada’s small population at any given time (the other third expressing themselves in French), always in competition with a flood of imported books from British and American publishers, has always been one of balancing small sales against great critical successes, small margins against hesitant reprints and looming bookstore returns.
    For a writer like Munro, with a book of fifteen stories and another fifteen either published or broadcast, 1968–69 was a propitious time. That decade had seen ferment throughout the world. In Canada, the country’s centennial was embodied in Montreal’s hosting of Expo ’67 and was excitedly celebrated throughout the country; the next year, Pierre Elliott Trudeau emerged as leader of the Liberal Party and the new prime minister. Greeted by a widespread enthusiasm, dubbed Trudeaumania by the press, he was a federalist from Quebec intent on beating back the separatist threat there while assuring francophones of an equal status withinthe federal government. By virtue of the centennial celebrations and the dramatic advent of Trudeau and his federalist followers from Quebec, Canada seemed to be changing with