Writers' Routines: Semi-Late Bloomer: Alice Munro

Jan 25, 2012
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Semi-Late Bloomer: Alice Munro

Alice Munro, a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize. Generally regarded as one of the world’s foremost writers of fiction. Her reputation as a short-story writer is international. As Cynthia Ozick put it, “our Chekhov.” -wikipedia

Alice Munro never meant to be a short-story writer. She’d aimed for sprawling novels. But when it came down to it, there just wasn’t time. ”I had small children, I didn’t have any help. Some of this was before the days of automatic washing machines, if you can actually believe it. There was no way I could get that kind of time.” As a young author taking care of three small children, Munro learned to write in the slivers of time she had, churning out stories during children’s nap times, in between feedings, as dinners baked in the oven. It took her nearly twenty years to put together the stories for her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, published in 1968 when Munro was thirty-seven.

“William Maxwell’s my favorite North American writer, I think. And an Irish writer Maeve Brennan, and Mary Lavin, another Irish writer. All short story writers say Chekhov, but really, he was terribly important to me. When I was in my twenties, I read Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty. Eudora Welty held my greatest admiration. But I read almost everybody in my twenties, as people do. I felt it necessary. When I first started to write I wrote imitative stories, the way everybody does.”

(Source: The Atlantic)