Alice Munro Died

Alice Munro had died. You probably do not know who she was. This woman was one of the great short story writers of all time. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Five of the best Alice Munro short stories

I found her first through The New Yorker (which had a surprising readership in prison), and then through one of her collections of stories. I was - am - in awe. I knew her people, they kind of like cousins to people I knew in Indiiana.

Margaret Atwood reads Dance of the Happy Shades by Alice Munro – audio

Her stories taught me much about writing short stories. They may have convinced me that is a skill I wholly lack, but now I know what a great modern short story looks like.

Alice Munro: Riches of a double life

She showed me that you can be from the middle of nowhere and become a writer-  if you work at it. I wish we had met four decades ago when I gave my own ambitions because I thought there was nothing to say. Yeah, I have many reasons to hang my head. She was more than good, though.

Although, KH hates me saying this, Munro showed me the similiarities between Indiana and Ontario. Well the similiarities with the Indiana I grew up - Protestant and of Irish and Scots descent.

The Atlantic published What Alice Munro Has Left Us, but I am not wanting another subscription. Besides, this hits on one of the points that I also liked about Munro:

Throughout her stories, there is admiration for skills of every sort—piloting an airplane, horseback riding, plucking turkeys—but she did not drive a car. This boggled my mind! Yet it also caused me to think that maybe marriages could be held together this way. The husband would have to drop you off and pick you up so he always knew where you were, even if you didn’t always know where he was (or deeply care). Perhaps this was an essentially literary—Munrovian—condition. Also, in the plus column, I could see in her work that she did not admire rich people but also did not sentimentalize the poor, though her sympathies and interests were more deeply located there. The way a hired girl in “Hired Girl” sweeps the floor and then hides the dirt behind the broom propped in the corner was exactly how I swept when young.

Not exactly a headline I would associate with Mund:`No One Wrote About Sex Like Alice Munro: Then I read further:

It’s not that the men are so special. They are not the best-looking or the smartest. And it does not take long for the protagonists, the women, to see this. Because Alice Munro wrote these women, their perception is as merciless as hers. In Munro’s 1997 short story “The Children Stay,” a young mother, Pauline, who is married to Brian, meets a man named Jeffrey at a party. “She had thought he was older than she was,” writes Munro, “at least as old as Brian — who was thirty, though people were apt to say he didn’t act it — but as soon as he started talking to her, in this offhand, dismissive way, never quite meeting her eyes, she suspected that he was younger than he’d like to appear. Now, with that flush, she was sure of it.” Jeffrey casts Pauline in a play; she soon learns he’s bullish and pretentious too. Because Alice Munro wrote her, Pauline runs off with him anyway.

A running off with, an abandoning for, a void leapt into. A flirt, a fuck, a disaster. In Munro’s stories, sex changes women like a downed line changes a puddle. They are charged with dangerous, unpredictable energy. Although Munro, who died Monday at 92, rarely depicted the sex explicitly — a man lowers onto a woman, a man pushes off of her — she wrote with such definite shading of looks and sound and erotically registered detail that you feel the shape of the sex more than you read it. And this gives it strength. In “The Children Stay,” Jeffrey tells Pauline it’s time for sex by crossing the room, bolting the door, then walking back toward her “with the whole story of the afternoon’s labor draining out of his face.” In the 1980 story “Dulse,” a man who the protagonist has just met beckons her to his bed with an open door and a wordless moan — and she considers it. Munro, a writer in total control of her instrument, spent seven decades building stories in which the most consequential moments of a life could be decided by a look that lasts just a second too long.

Nathan Bransford has links to other pieces at his A master of short stories passes away (This week in books) 

And I close out from The Paris Review: Alice Munro, The Art of Fiction No. 137

Funny thing is I did not hear of this until this past Friday. If I could keep my connection going, this would have been up sooner.