| Short story writer Alice Munro, was born Alice Laidlaw in Wingham, Ontario (1931). She's the author of many collections of short stories, including "Something I've been meaning to tell you"(1974), The Moons of Jupiter (1982) and Open Secrets (1994). She's widely considered one of the greatest living short story writers in the world. Her father was a fox farmer, and as a young girl she preferred helping him on the farm to helping her mother in the house. She studied journalism on scholarship at the University of Western Ontario and then struggled to support herself as a writer, but she finally gave up and became a housewife in the 1950s. She had four children, and stayed home to take care of them, but while they were napping, she began to read widely�many of the most important books of the twentieth century. And she began to write, though she found it very difficult. She said, "I went through about a year�when I couldn't finish a sentence. It was a time of terrible depression, about what I could do measured against what I wanted to do." Then, in 1959, her mother died, and Munro suddenly found that she was able to explore her personal life in her fiction in ways she'd never been able to do before. Nine years later she published her first book of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968). Munro often writes about ordinary people in small town Ontario, where she grew up. She said, "People's lives, in [my home town] as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, unfathomable�deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum." And she said, "I am at home with the brick houses, the falling-down barns, the occasional farms that have swimming pools and airplanes, the trailer parks, burdensome old churches, Wal-Mart, and Canadian Tire. I speak the language." She has never written what she considers a real novel, but throughout her career her short stories have gotten longer and longer, and sometimes she covers entire lifetimes within the space of fifty or sixty pages. Her story "Differently" (1989) begins: "Georgia once took a creative-writing course, and what the instructor told her was: Too many things. Too many things going on at the same time; also too many people.... Eventually [Georgia] wrote a story that was about her grandfather killing chickens, and the instructor seemed to be pleased with it. Georgia herself thought that it was a fake. She made a long list of all the things that had been left out and handed it in as an appendix to the story. The instructor said that�she was wearing him out." Munro's most recent collection of stories is Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001). ~The Writer's Almanac |