Reading one of her texts is like watching a cat walk across a laid dinner table. It is a challenge to find an unessential word or a superfluous phrase. Deborah Treisman, the experienced New Yorker editor and host of The New Yorker Fiction podcast, has shared that she sometimes crosses something out in a Munro story only to realise a few pages later that the sentence is doing a lot of work and must be left in. She realises she no longer writes as she did when she first started out.Įvery word in an Alice Munro story is doing work. When she does readings of her own early work in front of an audience, she finds it very difficult not to change the words as she reads. She insists on editing things even when editors disagree that a story needs any more further work. (The story was “Who Do You Think You Are?” which she changed from first to third person narration.) She has even paid a penalty fee for insisting on edits after a story has been sent off for printing. Munro is well-known as an endless self-editor. This is the nearest I can come to explaining what a story does for me, and what I want my stories to do for other people. Everybody knows what a house does, how it encloses space and makes connections between one enclosed space and another and presents what is outside in a new way.

I go into it, and move back and forth and settle here and there, an stay in it for a while.

I don’t take up a story and follow it as if it were a road, taking me somewhere, with views and neat diversions along the way. “ Almost any old way at all that I can get into it.” Munro has used the metaphor of a house when describing how she envisions a story: It didn’t bother me at all.” HOW DOES A STORY START? “It gave me a sense of responsibility, purpose, being important. She’d been doing significant amounts of it since her early teens after her mother was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. The stories would be well developed before she wrote them down. She nutted many of her stories out while caring for three young daughters. Housework occupies just the right amount of brain, and is sufficiently mundane to let the gates of creativity open. WRITING PROCESSĪlice Munro has stopped writing now, but she found the work of being a housewife compatible with writing. Which Munro story is your ‘shaken but not crushed? I think I know mine, but I’ll keep that to myself.

Alice munro new selected stories