Wingham,
Ontario, is a quintessential small Canadian town. Built on rich farmland and
difficult work, it stretches slowly, then quickly recoils, along the banks of
the Maitland River. For all of its unique in-fights, personal histories and
disparities, the town photographs like a textbook image of a southwestern
Ontario town built on the banks of a winding river. It is made of brick, of
dust, of gardens, and of the limitations of land, economy and hope.
It
is because the town is so physically small that it still surprises me that I
never knew, growing up there, that Alice Munro was from my town, too. Not, at
least, until, at age 15, I was packing up to move with my parents to an equally
sized, but very different, town in southwestern Alberta. It was during my
elaborate, teenaged moping and packing process that I came across a paperback
copy of Who Do
you Think You Are?
My
sister Elizabeth, twenty years older than me, had given me the book for
Christmas. I soon afterwards shoved it onto my bookcase, and had ignored it
since. To be honest, given the book’s title, I had, without further
investigation, assumed it was an unsolicited self-help book, and had treated it
accordingly.
Ready
now to slide it into an open box, I flipped first to the back cover. And there
I read the words “Alice
Munro was born and grew up in Wingham, Ontario.”
The
Town of Wingham still had only a minute replica of a museum when I was growing
up. Tucked into a tiny turret on the third floor of a 19th-century brick house, the majority of it was crammed into
one room, requiring staff to do constant head counts of the visitors to make
sure the museum wasn’t exceeding its fire limit. Volunteers had put together a
tight arrangement of glass-cased exhibits based on whatever random, inherited
items locals donated over the years. I remember our one class field trip there
focusing mostly on a terrifying collection of turn-of-the-century dentistry
tools, and an equally terrifying collection of corset-requiring dresses from
roughly the same period.
The museum has, I’ve heard,
since blossomed, moving into its own, much newer building many years ago, and
apparently adding an Alice Munro exhibit, to highlight her personal history,
and her connections to the town and its stories.
But
those connections were not ones anyone wanted to talk about in the ’70s and
’80s, when I was growing up on a hog farm outside of town. Those who knew there
was a published writer in their midst, and the even fewer who had read what she
had written, were not about to publicly extol the woman who had told the entire
free world exactly where their local brothel could be found (“The Lives of
Girls and Women”), and had even intimated it might be a rather popular stop for
area farmers, foundry workers and professionals alike.
Munro’s
genius has always been in her ability to see and describe the universal
struggles and harsh, human complexities evident in the everyday goings on of
the closely knit circle of strangers that make up the residents of small towns.
Hers is a gift of extraction and articulation, making the whole world out of a
mole hill.
The
result, however, can be a tough sell for the moles.
The
Wingham where I grew up was marked, and marred, by stark divides—a literal
division along the tracks between the "good" and “bad” parts of town;
a moral and school board division between Catholics and Protestants; a
righteousness division between the townies and farmers; and, later, when the
bottom dropped out of the pig market in the ’80s, a further division of tragedy
between those farm families whose fathers had hung themselves in the barn or
had tried to burn down the family homestead for insurance, and those who were
able to sell or otherwise survive. Alcoholism, drug addiction and illegal crops
barely made the basis for a good rumour, since they were everywhere. Those
people trying to survive there made up an enormously rich library of human
pain.
I
can’t speak for any other residents, past or present, of Wingham. But I can say
that—although I am in awe of Munro’s writing skill, and, for a number of
reasons, she is a hero of mine—I have still, some twenty-six years after first
discovering her words, read only a few of her books.
I consider it a failure of
courage on my part.
My
partner and I currently have four of her collections on our bookshelves. Of
these, I have completed two, including that copy of Who Do You
Think You Are? All four of the Munro books in our living room watch over my
shoulder in the evenings as I read Donoghue or Lavery or Edugyan, or go dancing
inside the poems of Shin or O’Meara or MacEwen.
I admit I have left Munro’s
stories largely alone because they are just too hard for me to read. The
objectivity a person needs to be able to follow a plot and its character
abandons me as soon as I enter her world. From the first sentence, I am too
much exactly there to function usefully in that place. In case there is a
reader alive who does not yet know it: She is that good. She has done far more
than get a place right. She has gotten its sense right.
I
should be so fortunate as to come from a place that produced only a mediocre
writer. I could read every word they had written; could mutter authoritatively “They got
that totally wrong; that church is on the other corner;” say “That’s right! I
remember the candy they sold in that store across from the park;” or feel a
warm bond of connection as I remember
having heard that story about the murder once, too.
But
it doesn’t work that way with Munro’s stories. Many are set before I was even
born. Most take place on farms, in fields and on streets I never walked, or, at
least, don’t recall. And yet, her sense of place is conveyed with such
intensity and sincerity, it doesn’t matter. From the opening paragraph, I am
back in Wingham—both mine and hers—its ghosts haunting every sentence, its
broken, yearning atmosphere brought to life across the pages.
I
have a wonderful friend who still lives in Wingham, and another who returns
regularly to visit family there. Their descriptions give me the sense of a town
that is both different and the same—one making its complicated way in the
modern world, while still navigating in the shape of a small, brick-hearted
town with too much history for its own good. I’m glad to see the town move
forward. I’m happy to hear it now has an Alice Munro exhibit, and an annual
Alice Munro festival, and a public pride in the accomplishments of its most
famous daughter.
Winghams are, after all, where
so many of us have come from. And where so many of us return to.
I’m proud of Munro, too. I
don’t assert the right to be. I don’t know her personally, and I lay no claim
to any connection beyond a shared love of language and an unwittingly shared
location. But, she set a course for what can be accomplished from a starting
point like Wingham. She taught me that the mysteries and hardships of a place
can and should be explored as much as its beauty. That knowledge can be gained
wherever there are people. And that singular human experience and circumstance
can become something powerful wherever there is someone to tell our
stories.
For
that example, I am truly grateful.
