Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

Laidlaw’s memoir, “The Boyhood Summer of 1912,” was published in 1974 and was one of several such pieces that appeared in a supplement to the Blyth newspaper, the
Citizen
, before he wrote his novel,
The McGregors
. Likewise, the
Advance-Times
notes visits made back and forth between Blyth and Wingham by the Laidlaw family. Sadie Code Laidlaw made a number of such visits after her husband died in 1938 and before she moved to Wingham in 1944.
    Taken together, the specific details of Munro’s childhood reveal connections that sustained her as both an individual and a member of a family and a community. “Connection,” Munro would come to write in the first part of “Chaddeleys and Flemings,” “That was what it was all about. The cousins were a show in themselves, but they also provided a connection. A connection with the real, and prodigal, and dangerous, world.” 19 So it was for Alice Laidlaw herself, growing up in Lower Town, yet connected to a web of relations, immersed in the culture and being of her home place – a wide-ranging community spreading beyond Wingham.
“Writing as a Way of Surviving as Herself”:
The Beginnings of a Writer in Wingham
    In November 1939, when Munro was eight and had just begun Grade 4 in Wingham, Lucy Maud Montgomery paid a visit and spoke at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian church there. According to the
Advance-Times
, Montgomery attracted a large audience to an evening program in which she both talked about her literary career and recited “one of herbeautiful poems.” 20 By the time of Montgomery’s visit, Munro had read
Anne of Green Gables
while, for her part, her mother had read all of Montgomery’s books. Munro was unaware of this visit until she was told about it quite recently, but hearing of it she spoke of her interest in Montgomery, saying, “I think she was boxed in by the very same things that a generation later could have boxed me in – being nice and being genteel.” Munro continued, “But she had a great eye, and I think
Emily of New Moon
is one of the best books in Canada. I just loved that book.” She recalls that she first read the book when she was nine or ten years old and was “pleased and troubled” by it. In her afterword to the New Canadian Library edition, Munro offers a statement about writing as a way of life, one that also gains power by applying so utterly to her own circumstances:
    But what’s central to the story, and may be harder to write about than sex or the confused feelings in families, is the development of a child – and a girl child at that – into a writer. Emily says, near the end of the book, that she has to write, she would write no matter what, and we have been shown not only how she learned to write, but how she discovered writing as a way of surviving as herself in the world.… We’re there as Emily gets on with this business, as she pounces on words in uncertainty and delight, takes charge and works them over and fits them dazzlingly in place, only to be bewildered and ashamed, in half a year’s time, when she reads over her splendid creation.…
    What mattered to me finally in this book, what was to matter to me in books from then on, was knowing more about life than I’d been told, and more than I can ever tell. 21
    Munro’s move from the Lower Town school to the Wingham school at the beginning of Grade 4 doubled her distance from home – she now had a walk of just under three kilometres, travelling through Lower Town, across the Lower Town bridge into Wingham, and through the town to the school at the corner of East John and Frances streets across Josephine Street, Wingham’s main street. “I was eight, itwas quite a walk, but I liked it,” she recalled. At the time, too, Munro saw herself as “different, and different in what I considered a favourable way.” She had seen herself in this way before she began school, and this sense of difference developed with the change in schools.
    Munro was not initially successful in the Wingham school. She was a year younger than her classmates and clumsy with her hands. “It was terribly difficult for me to learn to write with a straight pen, which we had to do then. Dip it in the ink. I would get about half a word done and it would end in a blot.” While she loved some of what they were learning then, Munro did not learn the material in the prescribed way – writing it down in notes. “I kept a notoriously untidy desk, with balls of paper crumpled up and