Huge thanks to Sarah Caskey, Nadine Fladd, and Julie Rivkin for their wonderfully thoughtful and engaging presentations. This was a tricky session for me, and I appreciated the guidance of Munro scholars–notably Maggie Redekop and Naomi Morgenstern, during the planning stage–as well as Lorraine York, whose work on Atwood and celebrity helped shape Nadine Fladd’s thinking about her (in her words) negotiation of “fangirling” and Alice Munro’s writing and legacy.
Here’s my introduction, along with the participants’ proposals, which were richly conceived (and, more unusually for an academic conference, accurately reflected their presentations, many months later):
In the wake of Alice Munro’s death, Canadian writer Sheila Heti praised her in the New York Times: “As a writer, she modeled, in her life and art, that one must work with emotional sincerity and precision and concentration and depth — not on every kind of writing but on only one kind, the kind closest to one’s heart.”
Several weeks later, Canadian readers—including those us of who have taught and wrote about Munro over several decades—learned that what Munro modeled “in her life and art,” in Heti’s phrase, was infinitely more complex.
The author of a famed triptych of stories about a mother-daughter estrangement, “Soon,” “Chance,” and “Silence”, Munro was also, herself, an estranged parent of an adult daughter. After an admiring New York Times profile of her mother appeared in print, in which Munro cited her close relationships with all three of her daughters, Andrea Robin Skinner—the youngest—contacted the police and conveyed her story of childhood sexual molestation by Alice Munro’s long-time partner, Gerald Fremlin. He was charged and, without media notice, pled guilty to a lesser count which did not require a jail sentence. Munro remained in close contact with two of her daughters until her death, while Andrea Robin Skinner was, effectively, banished from her family’s closeness because she could not tolerate her mother’s response, which oscillated between self-pity and denial.
Today we’re here for a conversation about how we read, teach, and critically assess Munro’s fiction in light of these very sad revelations—what Munro’s critical biographer Robert Thacker terms a “private family matter” that didn’t merit last-minute addition to his book after he spoke to Andrea Robin Skinner about her childhood experiences.
A Globe & Mail panel came to mixed conclusions. Russell Smith stated, “I’m perfectly prepared to accept she was terrible, like many artists.” Susan Swan described feeling “crushed”: “It was a betrayal also for me as a reader because she came across in our literary community as a truth teller, and here she hadn’t told the truth about herself.” But Swan also considered the question of Munro’s work: “I’m reading her work differently, but I’m not disowning her as an artist. I think the love of her work is what we have left to console ourselves with.”
Not all readers have responded in the same way. Today we’re here to discuss some of the range of questions that have arisen, some of which are still emerging as we consider how to teach Munro in a trauma-informed manner to students who are encountering her work—and her life—for the first time.
***
Dr. Sarah Caskey has taught Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto as a Lecturer for more than two decades, and she has taught Munro’s fiction in multiple course contexts. In the immediate aftermath of the news, Dr. Caskey had the challenge of thinking through her commitment to once again teach a third-year Special Topics course on Alice Munro in September of 2024. While enrolment declined, the students who stayed in the class explicitly said that they wanted to grapple with Munro’s legacy and the difficult questions of how to read her writing in the fuller context of Munro’s knowledge of her daughter’s abuse. Stories about secrets, silences, power, and abuse took on different and disturbing resonance, and many more questions were raised than answered about how to analyze and understand this content. Ultimately the discussions considered the values we assign to literary works and on what basis, and what happens when knowledge of the writer’s life changes the reader’s relationship to the art.
Like Dr. Caskey, Dr. Rivkin had a course on Munro planned for fall 2024, with a full enrollment of students. There was, of course, no hint of the disturbing revelations to come. But, in the light of what we learned, was it ethical to teach such a course? How were we to read Munro? Rivkin decided to let her students choose. If they felt misled, in the light of the revelations, she could teach a different course. But the students didn’t, maybe couldn’t, consider such a change. So the class went forward, with their permission. She set the timeline of Munro’s work against the timeline of the disclosures. The class was guided, to some extent, by a formulation from writer Rebecca Makkai, that Munro’s stories, after her daughter’s disclosure of the abuse, offered incomplete confessions. Beginning with the collection Open Secrets, the class found itself engaged in what felt like a forensic (re)reading of her work. For Rivkin herself, baffling stories like “Vandals” and “Silence” now had a (terrible) referent. For her students, the abuse haunted the stories more widely, constituting the open secret not just of that volume but of others that followed. Surely “Runaway” arose from that abuse, not to speak of “Dimensions” or even “Child’s Play.” Is it unethical to read the stories? Rivkin’s response, after working with these students, is that reading the stories with knowledge of the abuse actually allows a kind of cultural comprehension—not a pardoning or evasion, but a deeply contextual understanding of how power and patriarchy work.
Although Dr. Nadine Fladd is currently Manager of Graduate and Postdoctoral Programs at the University of Waterloo’s Writing and Communication Centre, her doctoral dissertation and the majority of her publications have focused on the work of Alice Munro. She will reflect on the question “is Alice Munro cancelled?” through an economic lens in light of cultural institutions such as the University of Western Ontario and the Alice Munro Festival of the Short Story choosing to distance themselves from Munro’s legacy over the past year. She will consider issues of critical complicity, namely who benefits (primarily financially) and who is hurt by the continued circulation of Alice Munro’s own work, continued scholarship about her work, and the cultural institutions associated with Canada’ only Nobel prize winner in literature
The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction 
Leave a comment