I wish I could remember exactly where I was, and why, when I first read a story written by Alice Munro. It must have been in the tumultuous 1970’s or the early 80’s when I could get my hands on paperbacks with size 10 fonts written by Canadians like Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, Timothy Findley, Robertson Davies and Alice Munro. Lives of Girls and Women made me want to tell my own stories, of girls and women. Also, boys and men, beloved dogs, good horses. Deer with eyes like Persian maidens. Grieving cattle, wild geese and ducks migrating north or south. Prairie chickens, brainless, noisy, beautiful and delicious. But mostly I wanted to write about girls and women surviving, thriving because they were fearless and adventurous, or dying inside, beaten down by poverty or someone’s fists but mostly because they were isolated and uneducated and lacked any means to earn their own money especially with half a dozen children in tow, on northern Peace River homesteads and in boom and bust oil and gas towns.
Writing well is much harder than it seems to the untrained eye. Writing the way Alice Munro wrote, flying between decades of memory and returning to one earthbound character, never losing track of the insight, the plot, the transformation of an entire world view during a single heartbeat, never leaving the reader behind in a murky cloud of convoluted language, is as close to literary alchemy as it gets. There was something else going on too, something I call “the emotional whammy”. Munro delivered quietly devastating truths about how people treat each other and how we treat ourselves.
She opened societal cages designed for the control and repression of girls and women and as we read her stories, we watched them make their escape, often blundering because we all make mistakes. We all trust the wrong people at vulnerable times in our lives. We all act impulsively, hopefully, blindly trusting, because we all want to be loved for who we truly are, or could be. Who Do You Think You Are? was the ultimate putdown for intelligent girls in the 1950’s which lost some traction by the late 1960’s and was blown out of most Western societal and familial waters during the 1970’s. Apparently the Americans couldn’t understand this culturally specific title (the Canadians and Scandinavians got it/grokked it immediately) and published it as The Beggar Maid.
Life, I can almost hear her say, is not a bed of roses. Or maybe it very much is, recalling the lurking thorns of old-fashioned roses; those mean-spirited rural gossips, the betrayals conducted within families, their failure to protect blooming innocence, to nourish roots, blameless bodies as well as minds. (And here my own mind skitters off, reconstructing the story of a fifteen year old boy left in a farmhouse with a few basic tins of food and flour and salt, one parental hand waved at the paltry garden plot, another at the shallow dugout pond covered in green scum. ‘At least buy him a guitar,’ urged the kind uncle. ‘Or leave the radio.’ They did neither. The boy shot himself as winter set in.)
When I finally found my own way to a writing school at the David Thompson University Centre in Nelson, B.C. in the early 80’s, after more than a decade of assorted work and travel and life adventures, encumbered by a social sciences degree and a dutiful teacher’s certificate, I was thrilled to hear Alice Munro would be a guest writer for a two hour seminar. The Moons of Jupiter had just been released and I had devoured it.
She, like so many famously talented women, was actually petite, trim yet curvaceous, a very attractive woman with lovely wavy hair. She was dressed in what I now recognize as a versatile and stylish road warrior female writer’s outfit with a particularly fetching pair of short black boots. She did not smile a lot or attempt to ingratiate herself in any way. In fact, she looked like she’d rather be elsewhere, a reserved or downright shy person, definitely a reluctant guest. She furrowed her brow when she listened to the introduction by our nervous fiction writing instructor and smoothed it only when she read excerpts. (I wish I had my notes in front of me now but they are, if they still exist, in the bowels of a shed packed with my ‘archives’, the grand appellation for a towering pile of boxes and rubber totes filled with fifty years worth of letters and manuscript story and novel drafts and newspaper and magazine clippings.) Even our writing instructors seemed subdued, suitably awestruck.
When the time came for questions, all too soon, as I would have happily sat and listened to her read her own stories with no interruptions for the entire seminar, there was a sudden lull. A would-be poet, of course, jumped in demanding to know if Munro wrote poetry. No, said Munro, seeing through -I fervently hoped-this transparent attempt to suck up to the poetry instructor as if Alice Munro’s devotion to writing fiction made her a lesser being in the global writers’ firmament. Someone else, whom I cannot summon up a name or face for, lobbed an unremarkable non-question which I also cannot recall. The instructors weren’t asking questions and looked to us, their haphazard collection of would-be writers, to come up with incisive well-informed ones. I wasn’t sure how many other students had actually read Munro’s books either.
“Can you describe what it’s like to work with editors?” came out of my mouth as I had only worked with a handful of newspaper and magazine editors by that point in my career, and had not sold a single work of fiction. We workshopped all our new stories in this hands-on School of Writing and while it was invaluable feedback, I knew I valued some opinions and advice a great deal more than others. I secretly worried about editors who viewed stories written by others as merely a springboard for what they’d rather I wrote versus what I needed help with while trying to express something more clearly or with a finer, more subtle nuance. From the corner of my eye, I saw one of the instructors nodding and heard ‘good question’.
Her intelligent brow furrowed. She glanced at me again, assessing me possibly, but it was too late to change anything about my age, early thirties, my long hair, my pale skin and blue eyes, my heretofore well-hidden urge to write stories of my own creation since Grade Two. Who Do You Think You Are? Do you have a job yet? Nobody wants to read your crap.
‘Well, I send my stories off to them…’ such hesitation, never mentioning anyone by name, ‘They go through it, and I go through it again, if necessary, and… when it’s ready, they publish it.’ Those are more or less the garnets of wisdom I received which left me with exactly nowhere to go except forward, armed with only my own tough mind, relentless work ethic and integrity. I’ve only caved in once for a short story accepted for my first national anthology publication, and I retracted it back to the original as soon as I possibly could when the story was included in my first book. I’ve stood my ground vehemently only three times in total, for the sake of veracity and what writers know to be the pivotal point in the work which changes how everything in the rest of the piece can be understood. Two were works of creative non-fiction, which is a different animal entirely than fiction to dismember and reconstruct. The genre reminds me of that dodgy term, creative accounting, where dry facts are kept on one side of the ledger and what passes for truth unfolds at self-conscious literary length on the other. The other instance was in, of all things, the text of my children's picture book about which the enthusiastic young editor had become overly proprietorial. She had been rewriting the text apparently, without my consent or knowledge, and removed a verse about a child's encounter with a herd of cattle and a bull because it frightened urban American buyers. Apparently. I am not making this up. 'The bull stays!' I remember roaring over the phone and it did. The book is now translated in five other languages, the bull intact in all ways.
When Polestar Press published my first collection of short fiction, Disturbing the Peace in 1990, I was on a book tour back home in the Peace River region on my way to the Tumbler Ridge Library in my little rental car. Peter Gzowski was interviewing Alice Munro and I pulled over on top of a northern Rocky Mountains foothill. I was losing my connection to CBC radio, driving into these mountains. Gzowski attempted to gently pry answers out of Munro but she was as reticent as ever and this pleased me. ‘Just read her books!’ I yelled into the vast wilderness of radio static.
All the answers are in them anyway.
The most wonderful compliment I’ve ever been paid as the author now of ten books in five genres for adults and children, came in what seemed at the time like a kind pat on the back, in a Canadian review of that first book of stories, or rather ten short stories and two long prose poems described, predictably as ‘uneven’. I remembered that dismal word forever of course but then I read the entire review as if for the first time and finally absorbed it. “Disturbing the Peace should be added to any Canadian collection for its promise and for what it delivers. Its characters are interesting, its settings classic. In fact, given a little time and encouragement, Caroline Woodward may do for Peace River country what Alice Munro has done for small-town Ontario.”
S.A. McLennan McCue in Canadian Materials for Young People
I should have remembered and reread that generously-written paragraph, printed it out, and pinned it up over assorted writing desks and tables where I carved out precious hours of time, with gaps of many months, over the next four decades. I worked constantly for wages outside the home, including opening and running a bookstore (and renovating the abandoned building first) in a village of four hundred to eight hundred souls depending on the season. It was not the grand old bank building on Government Street in well-read and well-paid downtown Victoria where Bill and Alice Munro first took a big risk and opened their eponymous bookstore, beloved still by so many of us, unlike our little Motherlode Bookstore in New Denver, B.C. which we shuttered after eight years of tough sledding with many joyful highlights along the way.
But never mind all that. We all have to make our own way as writers and we can only hope to find a readership for our work which depends on finding a publisher which sometimes depends on finding an agent but otherwise means terrible money from well-meaning or jaded, but always penny-pinching, publishers or downright fraudulent and incompetent small publishers which is my own experience. I am also thankful I have worked so long and hard all my life at lots of other jobs and that I now have three monthly pension slips in my tired paws to actually live on! Some of us have had well-heeled Sugar Daddies and Sugar Mommas to support us most of our lives so that we could write without interruptions or worry or guilt. Some of us made a lot of money, only a few of us, really, and they deserve every glorious penny of it for all the pleasure they have given millions of readers and film-goers. Some of us have a harder road to hoe than others and some of us write stuff which has limited appeal to the public and really ought to consider another vocation. Others like me receive just enough encouragement and actual sales to keep at it and live and work in hope of a break before we die, preferably. That’s just the way it is.
My final two encounters with Alice Munro were what I'd call 'almost in person', not through her stories which I read and reread, as she just got better and better as her dextrous literary alchemy shone brightly, as opaque to deconstruct as ever. Between 2001 and 2008, I was working flat-out as a publishers’ sales representative at that time living in Comox on Vancouver Island, where Alice Munro and her second husband spent their winters. I was stopped at an intersection, my vehicle loaded with catalogues and book samples from over thirty different Canadian, American and European publishers. Alice walked in front of me, smiling, head tilted to one side, nodding to herself several times. She seemed to have solved a tricky literary problem, or at least this is what I projected, sitting there grinning like a pumpkin at this Alice Munro sighting until a brisk blast of car horn somewhere behind me brought me back to my senses.
In 2013, when to the delight of her readers, especially proud Canadians, Alice Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, I was visiting our son in Victoria during a break from my work as a lighthouse keeper. Down the sidewalk came Sheila Munro, whom I’d met in the Blue Heron Bookstore in Comox and with whom I’d enjoyed a conversation about her writing. On her arm was her mother, looking frailer now, but still Alice Munro, and just a few days earlier awarded the Nobel Prize! I don’t think Sheila recognized me but we exchanged pleasant nods as I stood gaping at them both from the steps of our son’s old Victorian rental home.
I called out to their backs, “Congratulations!” Sheila whispered in Alice’s ear and a quiet crackly voice came floating back, “Thank you.”
No, I wanted to say, but didn’t.
‘Thank you,’ I wanted to say, with emphasis. ‘Thank you, Alice Munro’.
