Alice Munro - Women caught between moving and standing still....or images like the earthy smell of summer rain or blood soaked grass worn down...
Alice Munro biography, “For the Love of a Great Story.”
“The deep, personal material of the latter half of your life is your children. You can write about your parents when they're gone, but your children are still going to be here, and you're going to want them to come and visit you in the nursing home.”
Alice Munro only writes short stories, but in her nugget of time she spans lifetimes. We move effortlessly from city to country, a paradise both good and bad - dust floating on a sun beam squeezed between two decaying planks or the uneasiness of a lonely woman, waiting on a scorching prairie train platform.
Rural Canada and the Girls and Women.
Alice Munro was born on July 10, 1931 in the Canadian countryside. Her father was a fox farmer and her mother a school teacher. She describes the farm as, “A kind of little ghetto where all the bootleggers and prostitutes and hangers-on lived…It was a community of outcasts,” an interesting perspective since most of us regard the farm as a place of quaint harmony and moral plentitude. Munro, however, removes this milky wholesome footstep and replaces it with a hypocritical and suffocating boot print as women are unable to travel beyond the pasture and follow their individual paths.
Rural life dominates her work, including the “CanLit” (Canadian Literature) favourite, Lives of Girls and Women (1971). Her first set of short stories, Dance the Happy Shades (1968), won the Governor General’s Award for fiction – Canada’s highest literary award. Both books deal with young women growing up while trampled with tradition and custom. The need for escape and the freedom to explore life outside the farm is always lurking in “the shadows of the barn.”
Munro’s stories involve a small corner of the universe, southwestern Ontario. She’s been called the Canadian Chekhov because her stories are more about how a character reacts to their world than what happens: “What I wanted was every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together— radiant, everlasting." Detail is richly achieved in all her stories.
Away from the Farm
In 1951 she married James Munro, a fellow student at University of Western Ontario, dropped her university education and moved to Vancouver, British Columbia. In 1963, the family relocated in Victoria, B.C. and opened the locally famous Munro’s Books (it’s still there). The marriage ended in divorce and Alice moved back to Ontario, remarrying in 1976.
She’s published fifteen sets of stories up to her most recent collection, A View from Castle Rock (2006). She won the Giller Prize for The Love of a Good Woman (1998) and Runaway (2004). The Sarah Polley film, Away from Her (2007), is an adaptation of “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” from Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage ( 2001), a collection of stories where the women are older, wiser and trickier, much like the writer herself.
