Alice Munro: A Tribute
The stories
Seven stories by Alice Munro briefly discussed for the memorial
via invitation from Tara Penry
In my life of reading Alice, I’ve covered nearly all fourteen books and taught many of the stories when I was a professor of creative writing at George Washington University.
In my tribute, I discuss seven of the stories that I chose to teach and use fragmentary notes, not to explain, but to intrigue —plus an eighth story that I include with a link to The New Yorker because it is so timely in this year of our loss of a woman’s rights over her own body. (I note here that “Menesteung” that appears in Best American Short Stories of the Century is brilliant; I still teach it regularly, so I omit it here because I don’t want to scoop what I do with this incredible short story.)
“Labor Day Dinner” from The Moons of Jupiter; also anthologized: The loss of connection, the hope of love unfulfilled, the deadly acceptance that hangs onto longing … A gorgeously layered story, as are all of Alice’s stories, that focuses close-in on Roberta, magically done with interior work, with flashback, and with Alice’s use of omniscience so rarely used in the modern day short story and so effectively done.
“Deep Holes” “Some Women” and “Face” from Too Much Happiness, winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize: The first two: You gotta read them to understand the depth, the greatness and the ability to reach into the souls, hearts, dreams and losses of women. “Face”: A first-person story with a man as narrator. Risk and security. The novel-like feel that characterizes Alice’s work. Primal injury. Freudian trauma. The father who will not look at the child with the birthmark on his face. A childhood girl, the central “drama” when the rupture with the girl occurs, her action misunderstood as cruel. The girl doesn’t see our main character as needing to be hidden though hidden he has been, in most ways, all his life. A loving gesture revealed.
“Runaway” and “Passion” from Runaway: “Runaway”: Carla’s story. The bargains we make and that there is no place to run. “Passion”: “Grace’s view of her place in Maury’s world, the subtle sensuality in Alice’s work, the cost that comes with getting away. Grace paid a price, a price she ultimately was willing to pay.
“The Bear Came Over the Mountain” from Hateship, Friendship, Loveship, Marriage: The story Sarah Polley read in The New Yorker on an airplane and decided to make into the film Away From Her with a luminous performance by Julie Christie.
Note: The New Yorker thought Alice’s stories too long and cut portions. Her confidence by now firm, she replaced all the cuts when the story was published in her collection.
I add here that Alice, in this story, uses the technique I term “modular” fiction, characteristic of so many of her stories, meaning the story is not driven by the seeming orderliness of a time-driven chronology and the result is always meaning that strikes the heart.
For all of you passionate to write, late-starters and workshop attendees, read Alice if you have not. And remember this revelation from Alice’s daughter’s book Lives of Mothers and Daughters: Growing Up with Alice Munro1: “‘Boys and Girls’2 was one of her favorite stories, though not her best technically because of a certain disjointed quality she couldn’t correct. With this story, going against her usual instinct not to discuss her work, she brought the unpublished manuscript to a creative writing class at UVic …. One of the group’s participants, Lawrence Russell, attacked the story savagely, saying it was something a typical housewife would write. She wasn’t able to write anything for about a year after that episode.” —if one can even imagine such for this prolific genius. I know that Grace Paley had a similar experience—but even worse, from a creative writing professor.
My point: Rejection, misunderstanding are part of the process. Don’t give up. Look for a teacher who understands the difficult and weighty task of teaching and mentoring.
Here’s a link to her 1998 short story “Before the Change”3 that has abortion as part of its layered subject of not being seen and secrets that plague us.
Love,
Sheila Munro, Lives of Mothers & Daughters: Growing up with Alice Munro: a memoir, A Douglas Gibson Book, Toronto, 2001.
Published, of course! in 1968 in The Montrealer, before it was collected with fourteen other stories and published in Alice Munro’s first edition of short stories, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968).
Listen to the story and discussion via The New Yorker podcast. With my thanks to
who sent me the link.
Mary, you made me cry. There's a both/and here. Good/bad. You've taken my breath away for a couple of reasons.
First, I just wrote about getting reacquainted with Alice Munro after 40 years. After first reading her at UVic and not understanding her at all. The link is here if you get a moment to read it: https://kimvanbruggen.substack.com/p/on-seeing-shades-of-grey-unlocking
Second, because your post just brought me back to my 18-year-old self sitting in my very first class as a creative writing major at UVic. Full of hope and excitement. We were waiting for the professor to arrive. It was our first class with him. We were sitting with our backs to the doors, there were two. The quiet was shattered by a startling and unexpected slam of a door. We all turned towards the sound. No one was there. Then our heads spun like tops as a man entered the room by the opposite door. Yelling. I sat stunned as he proceeded to dress us down for the rest of the class and hurl all kinds of insults at us. The man was, yes, Lawrence Russell.
I promptly left the class and went to the registrar's office where I transferred out of the Creative Writing program and switched into English as my major.
Over this past year of writing on Substack I have often thought of what might have been. What if my first encounter hadn't been with that professor? What if I had stayed in the Creative Writing program at UVic? Would I be the writer I had so wanted to be back then? Would the writing I've always wanted to do come to me earlier, instead of 40 years later?
The fact that he stopped Alice Munro in her tracks for over a year made my heart squeeze in my chest. It's a name I had worked hard to forget, and yet the moment I saw it on your page, it all came leaping back to me. How many other writers have we almost lost because of a man like that?
This memory is painful, but your post about Alice is beautiful. Thanks for sharing your tribute to Alice Munro. I'm enjoying re-discovering her and look forward to reading many more of her stories with the nuance I can better understand.
Thank you so much for this heartfelt tribute. And for your lens on Alice Munro's work. I haven't read any of her writing (yet). Now I will! Thank you for the amazing trailer too ...