Tara, I enjoy your windows into writers I might not otherwise find. I started an important part of my real liberal education as a kid when I would find an author who captured my imagination, read everything they wrote, which invariably gave me leads to other writers and so on and so forth. It’s been a journey of discovery.
Now I am beginning to depend on you to bring writers to my attention I might otherwise miss. Thanks so much for helping keep my journey of discovery alive.
Dear Switter, I'm happy to write for all those who enjoy the thrill of discovery - or recognition, when an author's story swerves close to a pattern that someone recognizes as familiar. My liberal education had a similar start to yours. And it kept going from tracking authors. If Sara Crewe in A Little Princess got to learn French, so would my younger sister and I, in little stapled booklets with Mom's paperback Larousse dictionary and a pronunciation key for instruction. If Sara befriended a monkey, by golly, did I bother Mom for a monkey! Darned books. Your comment has taken me right back in time. ;-)
On my first Walden read, I bought a dictionary of mythology so I could understand what Thoreau was trying to get at in many of his book’s passages. It was hard work, but worth sticking to . Once I figured how to slog my way through, the hard reads became less difficult.
One also can’t help but develop a few literary criticism skills, both from reading criticism and also from gaining experience with writing. After my Hemingway phase, I learned a lot about writing dialogue, showing not telling, and an economical use of words. One teacher told me that if I hand copied For Whom the Bell Tolls, I’d learn more about writing via osmosis than I could learn in several classes. (I wonder if there is a market on eBay for Hemingway fan manuscripts?)
My deep dives also taught me other things about writers and writing, such as the realization I slowly developed that Hemingway was a real asshole as a human. I never learned that in a class. Also, both Shakespeare and Chaucer weren’t above scatalogical humor. Somehow, through their long lives, the 8 year old boys inside them survived.
What a joy and a source of magic that books reoriented our young desires, you toward learning mythology and me toward learning French (and monkey). Your teacher with the copy-by-hand advice was very clever! I believe that would be instructive.
I loved Chaucer and Shakespeare as a teen, partly because they made so much sense. I was surprised when I pulled Chaucer off my parents' shelves that the stories did not go over my head. Now I'm not surprised. We're all kids.
Launce. When a man's servant shall play the cur with him,
look you, it goes hard: one that I brought up of a puppy; one that I saved from drowning, when three or four of his blind brothers and sisters went to it.
I have taught him, even as one would say precisely, 'thus I would teach a dog.' I was sent to deliverhim as a present to Mistress Silvia from my master;
and I came no sooner into the dining-chamber but he
steps me to her trencher and steals her capon's leg:
O, 'tis a foul thing when a cur cannot keep himself in all companies! I would have, as one should say, one that takes upon him to be a dog indeed, to be, as it were, a dog at all things. If I had not had more wit than he, to take a fault upon me that he did,
I think verily he had been hanged for't; sure as I
live, he had suffered for't; you shall judge. He
thrusts me himself into the company of three or four gentleman like dogs under the duke's table: he had
not been there—bless the mark!—a pissing while, but
all the chamber smelt him. 'Out with the dog!' says
one: 'What cur is that?' says another: 'Whip him
out' says the third: 'Hang him up' says the duke. I, having been acquainted with the smell before, knew it was Crab, and goes me to the fellow that
whips the dogs: 'Friend,' quoth I, 'you mean to whip the dog?' 'Ay, marry, do I,' quoth he. 'You do him the more wrong,' quoth I; 'twas I did the thing you wot of.' He makes me no more ado, but whips me out of the chamber. How many masters would do this for his servant? Nay, I'll be sworn, I have sat in the
stocks for puddings he hath stolen, otherwise he had
been executed; I have stood on the pillory for geese he hath killed, otherwise he had suffered for't. Thou thinkest not of this now. Nay, I remember the
trick you served me when I took my leave of Madam Silvia: did not I bid thee still mark me and do as I do? when didst thou see me heave up my leg and make water against a gentlewoman's farthingale? didst thou ever see me do such a trick?
Like isn’t always easy, I think. And Shakespeare does an excellent job of pointing out our potential blind spots so we can pay heed.
I shall not, therefore, ever take my Dougie Sue to any formal state events, especially since farthingales are not as long these days and the lady’s leg proper might suffer a direct hit, which might be an awful thing unless my lady lives in Idaho City.
You're wise not to rely on farthingales nowadays. In Idaho City, the lady who receives a direct hit is liable to aim her prized new Beretta at the offender. Beware, beware.
Perhaps it says more about me than about Alice Munro that I'm comforted by her panic attacks and the "words that would not come." It's a good reminder that writing is a lifelong apprenticeship, and that it takes that kind of commitment to catch a break, and to be ready to seize it when it comes. It's a curious thing, this faith that learning how to be alone in a room will end up producing something of value to others. But if done well, we're not really alone in that room, are we?
You make me wonder now where Alice would be in the current landscape, whether she'd be a Substacker or still plying the magazines. Impossible to know.
Most of my information in this profile comes from Bob Thacker's biography, which is such a prize because you can see how much Munro trusted him with her story, including the hard parts. We're fortunate to know how both she and Jim understood those early years thanks to Bob's tact.
I like the way you put this: The writer's "faith that learning how to be alone in a room will end up producing something of value to others" is so improbable - preposterous, really! And then: we're not really alone. Well said! And now we know another writer who has been there before us, typing her way into the murky future on an improbable faith.
In the current landscape, I think she would go where trusted friends advised her to make an effort, and she would stay if it had the cachet or seriousness that she valued. I'm struck by how essential other people were to her opportunities: even way back when the French teacher worked extra hours to teach her German; and then Bob Weaver in radio told her to double-space her submissions. Those were just two I singled out. Bob Thacker names more people who were quite essential to her learning. There is a point in the biography when a Canadian editor (working like an agent) gets some of her stories into McCall's magazine, which is good for money and publicity, but she tells him she does not want to be in grocery store magazines; she wants a literary environment, even though it takes longer to break in and pays less. So I think she would only be on Substack if she thought it a dignified environment.
But a key difference is that (I think) magazines pay less now (relative to inflation and the cost of living); online submissions mean higher volumes and submission fees. The aid she got for free from people along the way would now require a coaching fee or a class. Higher bars to entry, lower economic returns. I don't know that even Alice Munro would make a living by her pen if she were starting to sell books today. The economy is different, but the writer's need for faith in reaching readers I think is just the same.
I love those reminders of mentorship. I've written about many of mine.
Are there "dignified environments" these days? That concept seems so foreign to our culture of branding. Maybe "The Paris Review" is able to maintain that air of aloofness, like an Ivy League college juking its admissions stats to seem hard to get. But much of what I read there is trash. Sorry. I've read work that was just shockingly bad in some of the most vaunted venues.
This is a rather rambly aside, but I wonder if taste was once one of those things, like academic achievement, that could offer a writer some social mobility. This is the story of Cather's artists: their talent and hunger, coupled with mentorship, can take them anywhere. But that model really does require the aesthetic to drive everything else. If it's revenue that drives everything, and mediocre or shoddy talent can still make bank, then the Ivy Peterses and Bayliss Wheelers are running the show. They don't care about a young Alice Laidlaw's talent. Not one bit. Not unless there's coin in it.
And so in that environment, you really do have to steward your own dignity. There is no dignified environment, there is just your integrity, which hopefully finds its own ballast.
It would be a good research project for someone to explore the declining pay in magazine work. I think you're right. I once spoke to a despondent Rick Bass at Central College (he had reached out to me because he was doing a residency at Depaw and was hoping to string together a few gigs while he was in the Midwest). The last thing that guy wanted to be doing was shlepping around to give workshops. But the plum setup he had in the 90s, when he could crank out his books from the Yaak and get paid well for short fiction, was long gone. I wonder if he's even seen as worth publishing anymore? I can't imagine that his activism books are selling much at all. That would also be a reality that Alice Munro would have faced.
I suspect that many publishers once carried legacy authors. If they had a new book, then it needed to be in the world no matter how well it sold. As you know from our private correspondence, even writers with stellar credentials and storied careers -- even writers with top-notch agents -- are being turned down, not because the new work has no merit, but because their prior titles showed middling or poor sales. Dignified environment?
Here's where your interview with Samuèl Lopez-Barrantes is so helpful, along with other posts I read from folks on the publishing or writing side of the indie market. Writing a succession of indie books might be a better way today. I hope writing is like water, seeking the fastest, strongest way to flow downhill. Certainly a tree has fallen in the old channel, but I think the hill still has a slope to it. I hope.
You invite every woman writer to indentify with Miss Laidlaw by the clever way you structured this piece. I love the way you got me to quietly read from first to last word. And then read it again.
A lovely tribute. What comes through is her work ethic in everything she did. Until finally she went all in on her writing.
As for me, I worry that "staring off into a different country" will take away from my other responsibilities, activities, and most importantly time with my (expanding) family.
I want to read my first Alice Munro story. You know I like to write about class, status, and wealth. Do you have a suggestion?
Thank you, David. I'll offer a few different suggestions for places to start.
My favorite place to start for both a satisfying story and a strong sense of class is the title story of the collection *Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage*. Munro gives us a sense of the desires and scope of life of a propertied father, a hired woman, a shopwoman, a son-in-law, and a privileged granddaughter, to various degrees. It's inventive.
When I asked Munro's biographer, Bob Thacker, what he recommends for new Munro readers, he also named *The Progress of Love*, but I haven't read that one, so I can't speak personally to its appeal for you. Worth investigating.
I do think The Beggar Maid (book) would be interesting for you; rural class distinctions are exactly the point of some stories, with an emphasis on shame. The "stories" here are more like "sketches," and some people may miss the strong plotting of "Hateship," but characters are strongly portrayed. "Half a Grapefruit" opens with a distinction between town kids, country kids, and the one kid in the high school class from across the bridge. The second story in the book, "Privilege," begins, "Rose knew a lot of people who wished they had been born poor, and hadn't been. So she would queen it over them, offering various scandals and bits of squalor from her childhood." From there we proceed to the school outhouses. There is so much of "squalor" in the book that it may not be for everyone, but that's the consequence of its direct, "unsentimental" view of class.
If you subscribe to The New Yorker, you should have archival access to many stories. "Free Radicals" (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/02/11/free-radicals) is a good example, I think, of Munro's conjunction of the ho-hum and the strange, the dull familiarity of life and the carving out of incident, character, and story from the surrounding life. Of this later story, I like that she allows herself to know less about her characters than in early stories, whom she knows (or her narrators think they know) wincingly well. It's as if she's asking, how little can I know of my characters and still make a story of them?
I'll be writing more about how her stories work next week. There is a cool distance that may be off-putting at first. I'll address that.
Last but maybe not least, if you get your hands on a copy of Bob Thacker's biography (linked in the Resources list), head to the index for any references to Jim Munro's family, Alice's in-laws. They were of a higher social class, and there is a keen passage when she writes later about her wedding photo with a caustic sense of her class shame in the presence of his parents. The short answer: You can't go wrong with Munro and class! :-)
I just had the great pleasure of reading "Hateship..." I loved the way she created the social setting of the town so quickly. And then the letters reminded me of the disastrous letter in Ian McEwan's Atonement, but in this case the reverse comes to be.
I hope I can contribute something to your tribute.
Thank you so much for giving me the gift of Munro.
Glad you enjoyed it! Mary Tabor and I were just talking about the next story in that book, "Floating Bridge." It also has a wonderful scene of class friction between two couples in a rural driveway. If you have the book in hand and want to keep going, the next story will continue the class theme, though there are other things going on also.
Thank you for this revealing personal chronicle. No sympathy here for her domestic/professional history. Except for her success, of which I am not jealous—and a brief bout of homelessness—the chores and distractions of domestic life are similar. It would be delightful to sleep beneath a stack of books in a cozy re-purposed bookstore. Life/writings were supported by my sometimes out of rust-belt-work spouse. He became an electrician and thermodynamics technician, apprenticing and taking that work because it would support both of us and the family. —You’ll decide whether or not to take my word for this. Though true, I would not have believed this as a youth: Success is something I cannot handle.
Excellent entry (and comments). Please don’t be discouraged! After reading I no longer want to experience her work.
Dear S., Thank you for the contrary comment! I'll be writing about the experience of Munro's writing next. She still may not be for you, and that's ok. Last week's post here about a novel based on Beatrix Potter's life makes about a 180-degree contrast. There is a coolness in Munro's writing voice that is not for everyone. I feel about authors as I do about teachers: Not every one makes a strong connection, and thank goodness. We remember special ones precisely because they reach us in a way that is rare. Glad to have you stop by. Perhaps you will help inspire my rereading of Chesterton, a writer I've loved and would like to make time for again.
Thank you so much for this, Tara.I look forward to reading about Alice Munro's writing voice. I read and liked the Beatrix Potter entry. For some reason my liking of comments is no longer available to me. I also very much look forward to your rereading of Chesterton.
Thank you, Tara. It was a stroke of inspiration to frame this mini-biography as the story of a writer who could have been anyone—although “anyone” did not have Alice Munro’s narrative boldness and understanding of the heart’s complications. Munro’s Bookstore in Victoria is Canada’s most beautiful bookstore, and one of the loveliest I know anywhere. I hope you get there someday.
You guessed it, Rona, I would love to make a trip to Munro's Bookstore, and my few jaunts to Victoria have always been wonderful. I always want to go back.
The danger of my approach to these profiles - bringing successful people down to the scale of "anyone" - is losing sight of accomplishments, but it's still worth the experiment. I'm glad you enjoyed it! Yes, Munro understood the heart's complications, and the way environments seep into us.
Thank you, Kathy! Haha, you make me laugh that there are implicit rules for comments. To love and say so ought always be enough, yes? Glad you enjoyed this perspective on the great Munro. :-)
Love this! I know I’ve said this very thing many times: “I didn’t foresee at all that it would be such a long haul to get anything written that would be any good at all.”
And your reveal!! Such fun!! You’re a great storyteller. I’m excited to participate in the memorial.
Speaking of revising and revising. I'm absolutely in awe of the process. Here I thought the draft before this one was pretty good. Well, this one is worlds better.
What’s lingered for me since reading this is the mentorship she had to help her develop her talent. Where are the mentors now? I had several great ones in my MFA program, but that’s not a sustainable model for me. I’m in two writing groups - that helps. And the conversations here are enriching and encouraging.
Yes, the mentors were so important. That struck me in the full-length biography, too. (I singled out the first important one, Robert Weaver at CBC radio, but there were others. She acknowledged the helpfulness of several people. Her agent was another.) Next week her biographer will tell the story of an editor finding one of her stories in a slush pile - and I'm sure it wouldn't happen the same way today. This poses the challenging question for me of how writing groups like yours (or other helpers) can help fill the gap in providing early and ongoing feedback and support that writers need. I think we don't want to leave that out of our calculations.
I’m late to this series. What a gift to writers here on Substack to share of Alice Munro’s tenacity. Surely, I feel more inspired to stay the course. And what a beautiful dedication to Munro. Thank you for this.
Ah, Renée, isn't it wonderful how normal she was? 😅 She found what she could do well, but I love the reminder that everyone struggles somehow. We only see the tip of each other's icebergs.
Tara, I enjoy your windows into writers I might not otherwise find. I started an important part of my real liberal education as a kid when I would find an author who captured my imagination, read everything they wrote, which invariably gave me leads to other writers and so on and so forth. It’s been a journey of discovery.
Now I am beginning to depend on you to bring writers to my attention I might otherwise miss. Thanks so much for helping keep my journey of discovery alive.
Dear Switter, I'm happy to write for all those who enjoy the thrill of discovery - or recognition, when an author's story swerves close to a pattern that someone recognizes as familiar. My liberal education had a similar start to yours. And it kept going from tracking authors. If Sara Crewe in A Little Princess got to learn French, so would my younger sister and I, in little stapled booklets with Mom's paperback Larousse dictionary and a pronunciation key for instruction. If Sara befriended a monkey, by golly, did I bother Mom for a monkey! Darned books. Your comment has taken me right back in time. ;-)
On my first Walden read, I bought a dictionary of mythology so I could understand what Thoreau was trying to get at in many of his book’s passages. It was hard work, but worth sticking to . Once I figured how to slog my way through, the hard reads became less difficult.
One also can’t help but develop a few literary criticism skills, both from reading criticism and also from gaining experience with writing. After my Hemingway phase, I learned a lot about writing dialogue, showing not telling, and an economical use of words. One teacher told me that if I hand copied For Whom the Bell Tolls, I’d learn more about writing via osmosis than I could learn in several classes. (I wonder if there is a market on eBay for Hemingway fan manuscripts?)
My deep dives also taught me other things about writers and writing, such as the realization I slowly developed that Hemingway was a real asshole as a human. I never learned that in a class. Also, both Shakespeare and Chaucer weren’t above scatalogical humor. Somehow, through their long lives, the 8 year old boys inside them survived.
What a joy and a source of magic that books reoriented our young desires, you toward learning mythology and me toward learning French (and monkey). Your teacher with the copy-by-hand advice was very clever! I believe that would be instructive.
I loved Chaucer and Shakespeare as a teen, partly because they made so much sense. I was surprised when I pulled Chaucer off my parents' shelves that the stories did not go over my head. Now I'm not surprised. We're all kids.
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
Act 4, Scene 4
[Enter LAUNCE, with his his Dog]
Launce. When a man's servant shall play the cur with him,
look you, it goes hard: one that I brought up of a puppy; one that I saved from drowning, when three or four of his blind brothers and sisters went to it.
I have taught him, even as one would say precisely, 'thus I would teach a dog.' I was sent to deliverhim as a present to Mistress Silvia from my master;
and I came no sooner into the dining-chamber but he
steps me to her trencher and steals her capon's leg:
O, 'tis a foul thing when a cur cannot keep himself in all companies! I would have, as one should say, one that takes upon him to be a dog indeed, to be, as it were, a dog at all things. If I had not had more wit than he, to take a fault upon me that he did,
I think verily he had been hanged for't; sure as I
live, he had suffered for't; you shall judge. He
thrusts me himself into the company of three or four gentleman like dogs under the duke's table: he had
not been there—bless the mark!—a pissing while, but
all the chamber smelt him. 'Out with the dog!' says
one: 'What cur is that?' says another: 'Whip him
out' says the third: 'Hang him up' says the duke. I, having been acquainted with the smell before, knew it was Crab, and goes me to the fellow that
whips the dogs: 'Friend,' quoth I, 'you mean to whip the dog?' 'Ay, marry, do I,' quoth he. 'You do him the more wrong,' quoth I; 'twas I did the thing you wot of.' He makes me no more ado, but whips me out of the chamber. How many masters would do this for his servant? Nay, I'll be sworn, I have sat in the
stocks for puddings he hath stolen, otherwise he had
been executed; I have stood on the pillory for geese he hath killed, otherwise he had suffered for't. Thou thinkest not of this now. Nay, I remember the
trick you served me when I took my leave of Madam Silvia: did not I bid thee still mark me and do as I do? when didst thou see me heave up my leg and make water against a gentlewoman's farthingale? didst thou ever see me do such a trick?
Never stuffy, that old Will. Never stuffy. 🙄 Bless the mark!
I think you and Bear have a new refrain for your waiting game: This hike is taking a pissing while to start!
Like isn’t always easy, I think. And Shakespeare does an excellent job of pointing out our potential blind spots so we can pay heed.
I shall not, therefore, ever take my Dougie Sue to any formal state events, especially since farthingales are not as long these days and the lady’s leg proper might suffer a direct hit, which might be an awful thing unless my lady lives in Idaho City.
You're wise not to rely on farthingales nowadays. In Idaho City, the lady who receives a direct hit is liable to aim her prized new Beretta at the offender. Beware, beware.
Perhaps it says more about me than about Alice Munro that I'm comforted by her panic attacks and the "words that would not come." It's a good reminder that writing is a lifelong apprenticeship, and that it takes that kind of commitment to catch a break, and to be ready to seize it when it comes. It's a curious thing, this faith that learning how to be alone in a room will end up producing something of value to others. But if done well, we're not really alone in that room, are we?
You make me wonder now where Alice would be in the current landscape, whether she'd be a Substacker or still plying the magazines. Impossible to know.
Most of my information in this profile comes from Bob Thacker's biography, which is such a prize because you can see how much Munro trusted him with her story, including the hard parts. We're fortunate to know how both she and Jim understood those early years thanks to Bob's tact.
I like the way you put this: The writer's "faith that learning how to be alone in a room will end up producing something of value to others" is so improbable - preposterous, really! And then: we're not really alone. Well said! And now we know another writer who has been there before us, typing her way into the murky future on an improbable faith.
In the current landscape, I think she would go where trusted friends advised her to make an effort, and she would stay if it had the cachet or seriousness that she valued. I'm struck by how essential other people were to her opportunities: even way back when the French teacher worked extra hours to teach her German; and then Bob Weaver in radio told her to double-space her submissions. Those were just two I singled out. Bob Thacker names more people who were quite essential to her learning. There is a point in the biography when a Canadian editor (working like an agent) gets some of her stories into McCall's magazine, which is good for money and publicity, but she tells him she does not want to be in grocery store magazines; she wants a literary environment, even though it takes longer to break in and pays less. So I think she would only be on Substack if she thought it a dignified environment.
But a key difference is that (I think) magazines pay less now (relative to inflation and the cost of living); online submissions mean higher volumes and submission fees. The aid she got for free from people along the way would now require a coaching fee or a class. Higher bars to entry, lower economic returns. I don't know that even Alice Munro would make a living by her pen if she were starting to sell books today. The economy is different, but the writer's need for faith in reaching readers I think is just the same.
I love those reminders of mentorship. I've written about many of mine.
Are there "dignified environments" these days? That concept seems so foreign to our culture of branding. Maybe "The Paris Review" is able to maintain that air of aloofness, like an Ivy League college juking its admissions stats to seem hard to get. But much of what I read there is trash. Sorry. I've read work that was just shockingly bad in some of the most vaunted venues.
This is a rather rambly aside, but I wonder if taste was once one of those things, like academic achievement, that could offer a writer some social mobility. This is the story of Cather's artists: their talent and hunger, coupled with mentorship, can take them anywhere. But that model really does require the aesthetic to drive everything else. If it's revenue that drives everything, and mediocre or shoddy talent can still make bank, then the Ivy Peterses and Bayliss Wheelers are running the show. They don't care about a young Alice Laidlaw's talent. Not one bit. Not unless there's coin in it.
And so in that environment, you really do have to steward your own dignity. There is no dignified environment, there is just your integrity, which hopefully finds its own ballast.
It would be a good research project for someone to explore the declining pay in magazine work. I think you're right. I once spoke to a despondent Rick Bass at Central College (he had reached out to me because he was doing a residency at Depaw and was hoping to string together a few gigs while he was in the Midwest). The last thing that guy wanted to be doing was shlepping around to give workshops. But the plum setup he had in the 90s, when he could crank out his books from the Yaak and get paid well for short fiction, was long gone. I wonder if he's even seen as worth publishing anymore? I can't imagine that his activism books are selling much at all. That would also be a reality that Alice Munro would have faced.
I suspect that many publishers once carried legacy authors. If they had a new book, then it needed to be in the world no matter how well it sold. As you know from our private correspondence, even writers with stellar credentials and storied careers -- even writers with top-notch agents -- are being turned down, not because the new work has no merit, but because their prior titles showed middling or poor sales. Dignified environment?
And now here I am feeding the wrong override :)
Here's where your interview with Samuèl Lopez-Barrantes is so helpful, along with other posts I read from folks on the publishing or writing side of the indie market. Writing a succession of indie books might be a better way today. I hope writing is like water, seeking the fastest, strongest way to flow downhill. Certainly a tree has fallen in the old channel, but I think the hill still has a slope to it. I hope.
You invite every woman writer to indentify with Miss Laidlaw by the clever way you structured this piece. I love the way you got me to quietly read from first to last word. And then read it again.
Oh good, Jill! I'm glad it worked. :-)
And a double-reading: now I'm honored.
Cool story thanks for sharing Tara!
My pleasure, Dee. Thanks for reading!
Tara,
A lovely tribute. What comes through is her work ethic in everything she did. Until finally she went all in on her writing.
As for me, I worry that "staring off into a different country" will take away from my other responsibilities, activities, and most importantly time with my (expanding) family.
I want to read my first Alice Munro story. You know I like to write about class, status, and wealth. Do you have a suggestion?
Best,
David
Thank you, David. I'll offer a few different suggestions for places to start.
My favorite place to start for both a satisfying story and a strong sense of class is the title story of the collection *Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage*. Munro gives us a sense of the desires and scope of life of a propertied father, a hired woman, a shopwoman, a son-in-law, and a privileged granddaughter, to various degrees. It's inventive.
When I asked Munro's biographer, Bob Thacker, what he recommends for new Munro readers, he also named *The Progress of Love*, but I haven't read that one, so I can't speak personally to its appeal for you. Worth investigating.
I do think The Beggar Maid (book) would be interesting for you; rural class distinctions are exactly the point of some stories, with an emphasis on shame. The "stories" here are more like "sketches," and some people may miss the strong plotting of "Hateship," but characters are strongly portrayed. "Half a Grapefruit" opens with a distinction between town kids, country kids, and the one kid in the high school class from across the bridge. The second story in the book, "Privilege," begins, "Rose knew a lot of people who wished they had been born poor, and hadn't been. So she would queen it over them, offering various scandals and bits of squalor from her childhood." From there we proceed to the school outhouses. There is so much of "squalor" in the book that it may not be for everyone, but that's the consequence of its direct, "unsentimental" view of class.
If you subscribe to The New Yorker, you should have archival access to many stories. "Free Radicals" (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/02/11/free-radicals) is a good example, I think, of Munro's conjunction of the ho-hum and the strange, the dull familiarity of life and the carving out of incident, character, and story from the surrounding life. Of this later story, I like that she allows herself to know less about her characters than in early stories, whom she knows (or her narrators think they know) wincingly well. It's as if she's asking, how little can I know of my characters and still make a story of them?
I'll be writing more about how her stories work next week. There is a cool distance that may be off-putting at first. I'll address that.
Last but maybe not least, if you get your hands on a copy of Bob Thacker's biography (linked in the Resources list), head to the index for any references to Jim Munro's family, Alice's in-laws. They were of a higher social class, and there is a keen passage when she writes later about her wedding photo with a caustic sense of her class shame in the presence of his parents. The short answer: You can't go wrong with Munro and class! :-)
Tara,
Thanks so much for this caring and comprehensive answer, which is really a syllabus! I'll start with the first suggestion and keep you posted.
Best,
David
Sounds good!
I just had the great pleasure of reading "Hateship..." I loved the way she created the social setting of the town so quickly. And then the letters reminded me of the disastrous letter in Ian McEwan's Atonement, but in this case the reverse comes to be.
I hope I can contribute something to your tribute.
Thank you so much for giving me the gift of Munro.
Glad you enjoyed it! Mary Tabor and I were just talking about the next story in that book, "Floating Bridge." It also has a wonderful scene of class friction between two couples in a rural driveway. If you have the book in hand and want to keep going, the next story will continue the class theme, though there are other things going on also.
I have a feeling I could spend a good part of the rest of the tear reading great AM stories! I will read that one for sure.
A contrary take.
Thank you for this revealing personal chronicle. No sympathy here for her domestic/professional history. Except for her success, of which I am not jealous—and a brief bout of homelessness—the chores and distractions of domestic life are similar. It would be delightful to sleep beneath a stack of books in a cozy re-purposed bookstore. Life/writings were supported by my sometimes out of rust-belt-work spouse. He became an electrician and thermodynamics technician, apprenticing and taking that work because it would support both of us and the family. —You’ll decide whether or not to take my word for this. Though true, I would not have believed this as a youth: Success is something I cannot handle.
Excellent entry (and comments). Please don’t be discouraged! After reading I no longer want to experience her work.
Dear S., Thank you for the contrary comment! I'll be writing about the experience of Munro's writing next. She still may not be for you, and that's ok. Last week's post here about a novel based on Beatrix Potter's life makes about a 180-degree contrast. There is a coolness in Munro's writing voice that is not for everyone. I feel about authors as I do about teachers: Not every one makes a strong connection, and thank goodness. We remember special ones precisely because they reach us in a way that is rare. Glad to have you stop by. Perhaps you will help inspire my rereading of Chesterton, a writer I've loved and would like to make time for again.
Thank you so much for this, Tara.I look forward to reading about Alice Munro's writing voice. I read and liked the Beatrix Potter entry. For some reason my liking of comments is no longer available to me. I also very much look forward to your rereading of Chesterton.
Father Brown may have been my first intellectual crush. Sigh. :-)
Father Brown, Good! The Man Who was Thursday, Good. Manalive is Good! Would gladly reread any of these. Thanks for Good work!
Thank you, Tara. It was a stroke of inspiration to frame this mini-biography as the story of a writer who could have been anyone—although “anyone” did not have Alice Munro’s narrative boldness and understanding of the heart’s complications. Munro’s Bookstore in Victoria is Canada’s most beautiful bookstore, and one of the loveliest I know anywhere. I hope you get there someday.
You guessed it, Rona, I would love to make a trip to Munro's Bookstore, and my few jaunts to Victoria have always been wonderful. I always want to go back.
The danger of my approach to these profiles - bringing successful people down to the scale of "anyone" - is losing sight of accomplishments, but it's still worth the experiment. I'm glad you enjoyed it! Yes, Munro understood the heart's complications, and the way environments seep into us.
I loved reading this, Tara!! I know I'm meant to write more than that on a Substack comment but I just had to say how much I loved it.
Thank you, Kathy! Haha, you make me laugh that there are implicit rules for comments. To love and say so ought always be enough, yes? Glad you enjoyed this perspective on the great Munro. :-)
Love this! I know I’ve said this very thing many times: “I didn’t foresee at all that it would be such a long haul to get anything written that would be any good at all.”
And your reveal!! Such fun!! You’re a great storyteller. I’m excited to participate in the memorial.
I love that line, too! I wonder how I ever wrote anything quickly and felt satisfied. She revised and revised. 😅
Glad you’re part of the memorial. I’m eager to see your story. You can’t beat Substack for writer gatherings.
Speaking of revising and revising. I'm absolutely in awe of the process. Here I thought the draft before this one was pretty good. Well, this one is worlds better.
I hear that! 😅
What’s lingered for me since reading this is the mentorship she had to help her develop her talent. Where are the mentors now? I had several great ones in my MFA program, but that’s not a sustainable model for me. I’m in two writing groups - that helps. And the conversations here are enriching and encouraging.
Yes, the mentors were so important. That struck me in the full-length biography, too. (I singled out the first important one, Robert Weaver at CBC radio, but there were others. She acknowledged the helpfulness of several people. Her agent was another.) Next week her biographer will tell the story of an editor finding one of her stories in a slush pile - and I'm sure it wouldn't happen the same way today. This poses the challenging question for me of how writing groups like yours (or other helpers) can help fill the gap in providing early and ongoing feedback and support that writers need. I think we don't want to leave that out of our calculations.
This is a beautiful story, beautifully told. Thank you, Tara!
Thank you for sharing it!
Love this Tara. Such a joy to read, made me smile, gave me goosebumps, and was incredibly inspiring. Thank you.
Yay! Glad you enjoyed it. :-)
I really enjoyed this post. Thank you.
Annette, Thank you for reading and commenting!
Such a vivid portrait of a brilliant writer. Beautifully presented and impeccably researched. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Mary!
Tara,
I’m late to this series. What a gift to writers here on Substack to share of Alice Munro’s tenacity. Surely, I feel more inspired to stay the course. And what a beautiful dedication to Munro. Thank you for this.
Ah, Renée, isn't it wonderful how normal she was? 😅 She found what she could do well, but I love the reminder that everyone struggles somehow. We only see the tip of each other's icebergs.
Tara, I love the reminder, too, especially on the hard days. Thank you for this series.
Thank you - that was an utterly lovely, inspiring read.
I'm so glad you enjoyed it. Thank you for letting me know. 🙏