Alice Munro Writing Her Lives, a Biography

Recalling her university years, Munro says that she loved her time there, "being in that atmosphere, having all those books, not having to do any housework. Those are the only two years of my life without housework." Not that she has greatly minded such work, either before university or after, but those two years at Western stand singular in her memory: "to have that concentration of your life, that something else was the thing you got up in the morning to do, and it was all reading and writing, studying." Munro enrolled initially in the journalism program as something of a cover, so that she would not have to say that she wrote fiction though, given the contributor note in the April 1950 Folio that has her major as Honours English "with an emphasis on creative writing," it was not much of a cover. The journalism program required English, and that first year Munro also took English history (which she says she already knew backwards), economics, French conversation, and psychology. Those enrolled in programs like journalism that is, with some sort of applied focus were put in the same sections of these courses and were seated alphabetically. Thus Alice Laidlaw met Diane Lane a first-year pre-business student from Amherstburg who became a friend and roommate. Both students had come from small towns, neither had much money (though Laidlaw was the more strapped), and each, initially, roomed with someone she knew from home. During that first year, each found that she was not enjoying the association with her original roommate. So the two took to spending time together at the public library, where Munro had a part-time job two or three afternoons a week sorting and reshelving books (as she also did at the Lawson library on campus on Saturday afternoons). Eventually, Munro moved into the same rooming house as Lane the upstairs of a house belonging to Mr. and Mrs. Charlie Buck at 1081 Richmond Street where she lived through her second year. Mr. Buck's brother Tim was the leader of the Communist Party of Canada and had been in jail. The Bucks "rented the entire upstairs of their house, and it was a place where vaguely intellectual non-sorority-type girls lived." Munro recalls that "we were all fairly poor, and we all cooked these messes we made on hotplates." Socially, at the time, she remembers, "Western was fraternity, sorority. Not too serious." That second year was "interesting, but fun, because I was then with people at University who were more or less like me." Munro captures some of this in an unpublished draft story called "The Art of Fiction," which draws on her time at Western. The narrator writes, "During my university years I lived in a house which was not really very big and which sheltered seven other girls, a landlady who wove her own skirts and belonged to a Bell Ringers Society, and a periodically confined lovesick Siamese cat." During their first year, both young women took the same English 20 a survey of British literature class from Robert Lawrence and, through him, they came to the attention of the English department. Just as in high school, Munro made her mark by what she wrote: as a student she did not have much to say in class, but Lawrence read "The Dimensions of a Shadow," a story she wrote that became her first publication. The English department was seeking students for its honours program, and both Laidlaw and Lane were successfully recruited. Munro recalls that some time during that first year she was approached by Professor Murdo MacKinnon about switching to English. By that time, she remembers, she had "run afoul of economThacker, Robert is the author of 'Alice Munro Writing Her Lives, a Biography', published 2005 under ISBN 9780771085147 and ISBN 0771085141.