Dear Life - Dear Alice Munro, Part 3

 Talking about Alice Munro's Dear Life (2012; Vintage International, 2013) still.

I think there is a certain Scottish strain in her writing which may also be why I find similarities with Indiana. Here may be a key difference between Ontario and Indiana: Indiana swallows ethnicities whole. There is little immigrant culture that survives in Indiana which has piled on top of the Scots and Irish and Swiss and Germans until there is only a homogenized whole. Read what Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. wrote in Palm Sunday about Indianapolis' German culture during World War I. Go down to Vevay, Indiana, and see what signs there are of Switzerland.

Indiana writers can learn from the Canadians. I guess that is the main point of these notes. To point out my own education and how it may apply to others. Ontario is both familiar and different. Munro's characters remain where they are even though they know where the bright lights shine.  So do we who remain in the Great Midwest.

I had this thought about Alice Munro rewriting Booth Tarkington's Alice Adams and the novel having a different ending, one less temporizing the heroines failure to rise above her conditions. 

Anyway, go read Alice Munro. Better to read her than read about her, and maybe you will try to put your world into words. 

sch

2/26 -2/27/2020