Alice Munro (1931-2024)

I didn't know I'd be drawn into Native American history. I didn't know we'd come to live in a brand new house with an entire acre of land between us and the Floyd River. I had no idea that acre and that land would employ us, spring 'till fall. I thought I'd pay golf just up the road and drown worms in nearby ponds, and the river, of course. The truth is I didn't know what retirement was or would be.

I'd created mandates, from what little I knew. I'd get myself a definitive edition of Emily Dickinson  (accomplished!) and go through the poems (begun. . .) as closely as I could, knowing that often a meaning would be elusive. "Read Emily Dickinson." 

I took along, from school, thirty or forty books from my teaching library, just a few books that I treasured--Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, every last Ray Carver I had, Toni Morrison's Beloved, a few more. I've never been a person who reads a book twice--I'm not that good of a reader. Honestly, I've been envious for most of my days of the instinctual love of reading some people have. I don't have it--I wish I did. There are books I took along simply because I didn't know if I could honestly live without them all around, but I've never read a book twice--that takes a real reader. 

I took with us my entire collection of Alice Munro. Having read maybe three or four of them and  used many individual stories in classes, I knew her work (she was only a short story writer) were perfectly wonderful. When I retire, I told myself, "I'm going to read the entire library of Alice Munro, eight or ten books of her short stories, because I loved so much of what I'd read. 

See that picture above?--that's the first row of the upper bookcase standing in front of my desk. Haven't been touched until this morning, when I opened Friend of My Youth and was once again reminded how I learned to love reading, an act that, as I said, didn't come natural to me. I am--I'm baring my soul here--an analyzer, not simply a listener, and while there are advantages to what I do, there are disadvantages too. Just look at what happens to the bare page. Who do you know that scribbles up a page like that?

All of this is occasioned by the death of Alice Munro, an event which struck me to the bones when I read it in a news flash from NY Times. I knew she'd retired from writing (in 2013), when she announced she was suffering from dementia. I knew she won the Nobel Prize for literature that year as well, a fitting choice. I know I wrote about it on this blog years ago, but the truth is I  hadn't heard of her or even thought of her for some time.

And now she's gone. For a long time, there has been no new Alice Munro collection--I would suppose that's part of it too. But the announcement seemed almost a missive from outer space--"Alice Munro--dead?"

Let me just say this quickly: she was (and is: "literature lives") nothing less than the best short story writer of all time.

I won't say anymore, but don't be surprised if you read more about her on these pages because I really ought to make it a solemn vow now, a resolution, to read all I have of Alice Munro. 

There she is, still alive, right down front of the desk where I'm sitting now. See her? Top of the page.