Considering Alice Munro

I’ve been spending a fair amount of time working on a Munro chapter, in my Canadian women’s crime fiction book. The revisions since the spring have been rather more extensive than I’d anticipated. I thought I was writing about how Munro depicts violent crime, or suspicion that crimes have been committed, in a range of short stories: “Child’s Play,” “Vandals,” “Cortes Island,” “Love of a Good Woman,” “Free Radicals,” “Fiction,” “Fits,” and “Open Secrets.”

Yet I’ve ended up writing about how Munro uses stories of “open secrets” to consider issues of guilt, complicity, and culpability. Along with the role of bystanders, who know, and do nothing. Or suspect, but don’t want to inquire further. The stories I begin with, and keep coming back to, are from Who Do You Think You Are?

In “Royal Beatings,” the protagonist Rose experiences violent beatings that are sexualized in complicated, furtive ways for both participants. In “Wild Swans,” a now-teenage Rose travels alone by train and is subject to molestation by the man in the adjacent seat, who claims to be a church minister. The stories are linked in part through nausea and food. “Royal Beatings,” at least, has some autobiographical antecedents; Munro has described her father’s violence.

At times, I’ve experienced a sense of profound isolation as I write on these stories. This is challenging material for me, and there’s a bad-joke quality to my shift from working on trauma to working on Munro to avoid trauma. Recently, though, I’ve been thinking and writing in community.

Huge thanks to Sarah Caskey, Julie Rivkin, and Nadine Fladd for signing on to prepare a Special Session proposal for next January’s MLA Convention. It’s in Toronto, and it felt important to address Munro in that context. I’m also looking forward to hearing from Naomi Morgenstern. And there’s new work to anticipate, including the book that Maggie Redekop (who has shaped my thinking on Munro) is finishing up.

All this to say, the ideal of a conversation has materialized for me over these past weeks. But even that last sentence, the word “materialized” . . . it is always and forever linked, in my mind, to Munro and her story “Material.” Her wisdom about speech and silence, real life and fiction–and her limitations.