Returning Home: Alice Munro and the Trouble with Great Authors

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 19^th-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.