Faculty of Humanities and Social Science > English

Alice Munro:Some facts

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irina:
INTERVIEWER
How was this accomplished? By phone or by mail? Do you ever go into The New Yorker and hammer it out?
MUNRO
By mail. We have a very fruitful phone relationship, but we’ve only seen each other a few times.
INTERVIEWER
When did you first publish in The New Yorker?
MUNRO
“Royal Beatings” was my first story, and it was published in 1977. But I sent all my early stories to The New Yorker in the 1950s, and then I stopped sending for a long time and sent only to magazines in Canada. The New Yorker sent me nice notes though—penciled, informal messages. They never signed them. They weren’t terribly encouraging. I still remember one of them: The writing is very nice, but the theme is a bit overly familiar. It was, too. It was a romance between two aging people—an aging spinster who knows this is it for her when she’s proposed to by an aging farmer. I had a lot of aging spinsters in my stories. It was called “The Day the Asters Bloomed.” It was really awful. And I didn’t write this when I was seventeen; I was twenty-five. I wonder why I wrote about aging spinsters. I didn’t know any.
INTERVIEWER
And you married young. It’s not as though you were anticipating a life as an aging spinster.
MUNRO
I think I knew that at heart I was an aging spinster.
INTERVIEWER
Were you always writing?
MUNRO
Since about grade seven or eight.
INTERVIEWER
Were you a serious writer by the time you went to college?
MUNRO
Yes. I had no chance to be anything else because I had no money. I knew I would only be at university two years because the scholarships available at that time lasted only two years. It was this little vacation in my life, a wonderful time. I had been in charge of the house at home when I was in my teens, so university was about the only time in my life that I haven’t had to do housework.
INTERVIEWER
Did you get married right after your two years?
MUNRO
I got married right after the second year. I was twenty. We went to Vancouver. That was the big thing about getting married—this huge adventure, moving. As far away as we could get and stay in the country. We were only twenty and twenty-two. We immediately set up a very proper kind of middle-class existence. We were thinking of getting a house and having a baby, and we promptly did these things. I had my first baby at twenty-one.
INTERVIEWER
And you were writing all through that?
MUNRO
I was writing desperately all the time I was pregnant because I thought I would never be able to write afterwards. Each pregnancy spurred me to get something big done before the baby was born. Actually I didn’t get anything big done.
INTERVIEWER
In “Thanks for the Ride,” you write from the point of view of a rather callous city boy who picks up a poor town girl for the night and sleeps with her and is alternately attracted to and revolted by the poverty of her life. It seems striking that this story came from a time when your life was so settled and proper.
MUNRO
A friend of my husband’s came to visit us the summer when I was pregnant with my eldest daughter. He stayed for a month or so. He worked for the National Film Board, and he was doing a film up there. He told us a lot of stuff—we just talked the way you do, anecdotally about our lives. He told the story about being in a small town on Georgian Bay and going out with a local girl. It was the encounter of a middle-class boy with something that was quite familiar to me but not familiar to him. So I immediately identified strongly with the girl and her family and her situation, and I guess I wrote the story fairly soon afterwards because my baby was looking at me from the crib.
INTERVIEWER
How old were you when that first book came out?
MUNRO
I was about thirty-six. I’d been writing these stories over the years and finally an editor at Ryerson Press, a Canadian publisher that has since been taken over by McGraw-Hill, wrote and asked me if I had enough stories for a book. Originally he was going to put me in a book with two or three other writers. That fell through, but he still had a bunch of my stories. Then he quit but passed me onto another editor, who said, If you could write three more stories, we’d have a book. And so I wrote “Images,” “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” and “Postcard” during the last year before the book was published.
To be continued..

Tahsina:
Here are five facts about Munro and her writing.

Writing style

Munro’s stories are known for their strong regional focus on small-town southwestern Ontario, a place she knew from her years growing up in Huron County. They give insight into deeply personal and complex experiences and often revolve around her characters' personal epiphanies, which happen when current events reveal an overlooked aspect of the past.

Munro has a longstanding relationship with several publications, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly and The Paris Review. The New Yorker's Chip McGrath was Munro's first editor.

Canadian roots

Munro was born on July 10, 1931, in Wingham, Ont., to Robert Eric Laidlaw, a fox and mink farmer, and Anne Clarke Laidlaw, a school teacher.

At 19, she published her first story, The Dimensions of a Shadow, in Folio, a student literary magazine, while she was a student at the University of Western Ontario in London. During her time at university, she worked as a waitress, tobacco picker and library clerk.

She then moved to British Columbia with her first husband, James Munro. In 1963, they moved to Victoria, where Munro founded a popular bookstore.

Munro's Books still stands today and celebrated its 50th anniversary earlier this year.   

Champion of her early work

In 1951, she started corresponding with Robert Weaver, an acclaimed literary editor and broadcaster, whom she credits as one of the first people to take her writing seriously.

Weaver created programs such as CBC Stage, CBC Playhouse, Canadian Short Stories and Anthology, where Munro's work appeared prior to Dance of the Happy Shades, her first published collection of stories.

Coming home 

When Munro returned from British Columbia to southwestern Ontario, not everyone was glad to have her back. Some Huron County residents complained that her stories were too closely based on locals' experiences. 

At the time, a local newspaper accused Munro of making the people of Wingham "the butt of soured and cruel introspection,” as she noted in a letter to the editor of the Montreal Gazette in 1982.

Munro wrote that she wanted to make it clear "that I passed no such judgment."

"Indeed, I always found Wingham lively and interesting."

She later said the local hostility subsided.

Wingham now has a literary garden to honour the renowned author, but the house where she grew up has changed. It is now a beauty parlour and its kitchen no longer exists.

"I thought if I did [go back], I’d ask to see the living room. There’s the fireplace my father built and I’d like to see that," Munro told the Paris Review in an interview.

Movie adaptation

Two of Munro’s stories have formed the basis for films.

The Bear Came Over the Mountain was adapted into the movie, Away from Her, which was directed by Canadian actor and filmmaker Sarah Polley. It stars Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent.

The movie debuted at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival and Polley was nominated for an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay.

The story Hateship Friendship Courtship Loveship Marriage was also adapted for film. Hateship Loveship premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last month.

Source: CBC News, Canada

Tahsina:
This thread will look bare without this gorgeous lady's photo :)

Shampa Iftakhar:
Here is another one

irina:
Thanks for sharing.Here goes 10 top things about Alice Munro.
1. Her birth name was Alice Laidlaw.
2. She was born on July 10, 1931, just outside Wingham, Ontario, which has made frequent appearances in her stories (renamed Jubilee, or Hanratty).
3. Her father, Robert Laidlaw, was a direct descendant of James Hogg, author of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
4. She has said she began to escape into books after her schoolteacher mother was diagnosed with an unusual form of Parkinson's when Alice, the oldest of three children, was 10 years old.
5. She won a scholarship to study journalism at the University of Western Ontario, where she supported herself by selling her blood and picking suckers from tobacco, among other jobs. She published her first story, "The Dimensions of a Shadow", as a student in 1950.
7. With her first husband, Jim Munro, she opened a bookshop, Munro's Books, which is still trading today in Victoria, British Columbia. Their USP was to stock paperbacks almost exclusively, at a time when many traditional booksellers despised them.
8. Her second husband, geographer Gerry Fremlin, was an old friend from university. They decided to get married after meeting up again over three martinis.
9. When she won the Man Booker International prize in 2009, judge Jane Smiley described her work as "practically perfect".
10. She is the first Canadian citizen to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. (Saul Bellow was born Canadian but took US citizenship in 1941, 26 years before he won the Nobel)
Source: The Gurdian

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