More On Alice Munro

 If you want to write short stories, then read the now late Alice Munro.

If you are from off-the-beaten track and want to be a writer, read Alice Munro.

Granta Magazine opened its archives for these short stories (I hope they are still available):

• Night
• In Sight of the Lake
• A Queer Streak Part One: Anonymous Letters
• A Queer Streak Part Two: Possession

Millions did something similar with A Beginner’s Guide to Alice Munro  -

Considering which of Alice Munro’s stories to read can feel something like considering what to eat from an enormous box of chocolates. There are an overwhelming number of choices, many of which have disconcertingly similar appearances — and, while you’re very likely to choose something delicious, there is the slight but real possibility of finding yourself stuck with, say, raspberry ganache.

and Only So Many Words Remain: On Alice Munro’s Dear Life

Which is to say: contemporary greatness is a strange thing. Alice Munro’s books are reviewed right there beside Ann Patchett and Richard Russo’s; they’re set on the New Releases table between the latest from Jane Smiley and Dave Eggers. But they’re of a different order, they’re made of different stuff. The Mona Simpson quote that appears on many of Munro’s paperbacks (“The living writer most likely to be read in a hundred years,”) seems truer than ever, and it gives an air of preemptive nostalgia to the act of reading her. Soon enough it will seem very strange, almost miraculous, that we could go to the store to buy a new book by Alice Munro.

both by Ben Dolnick (2012).

The Paris Review offered up Inside Alice Munro’s Notebooks by Benjamin Hedin. Ever since I read Steinbeck's notebooks he kept while writing Grapes of Wrath, I found such things to be wildly educational. It is one thing to read a finished work and think it was always this, no doubts, no revisions, but reading a writer's notebooks tells you there are always doubts, there are always revisions, and the finished work is different from its beginnings.

Yet Munro, the Nobel laureate who passed away last week at the age of ninety-two, never entirely quit the habit of longhand. On deposit with her manuscripts, correspondence, and other papers at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, are several folders of notebooks. In them one finds a little bit of everything: fragments and false starts, alternate endings, even drawings. The notebooks were where Munro tinkered and experimented, made detours and sudden revisions—where she surveyed the whole field of possibility before committing herself to a full, typed version of a story.

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In the outline, we can see Munro’s intention to break up the story into multiple chapters and time schemes, though she continued to be uncertain about other things. Having drafted “The Progress of Love” in the third person, she switched to the first, and it stayed that way until galleys were printed, when Munro went through and changed every “I” to a “Phemie” or a “she.” Then, just before publication, she changed them all back again. Munro could be a tireless reviser. It was not uncommon for her to alter a story after it had appeared in a magazine, publishing a different version in her books. 

When I was younger, when I first wanted to be a writer, I was so ignorant of contemporary writers - high school and even my own attempts back then at finding out what was going on in the wider world were no help. That helped me decide not to be a writer. Which is why I do posts like this. This is why I hope any hopeful writers will see beyond what they were taught in school.

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