Ideas - The Lives of Women, Readers and Alice Munro

Episode Date: May 14, 2024

On a cold, autumn night a group of women gather for their regular book club. Over snacks, wine and tea, they discuss Alice Munro's work, and how her stories illuminate some of the deepest issues in their own lives. Munro died on Monday at the age of 92.

My name is Graham Isidor. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas, I'm Nala Ayyad. From small town Ontario to a Nobel Prize for Literature, Alice Munro's fiction has traveled the world and earned her international acclaim. The author's death on Tuesday at the age of 92 drew appreciation from other major writers. An obituary in the UK Guardian called her a titan of the short story and

mentioned her reputation as the Canadian Chekhov. Important praise for a significant author. But her subtle, powerful, sometimes emotionally violent stories have resonated with regular readers too. In the autumn of 2016, audio documentarian Chris Brooks took his recording gear to a book club in St. John's, Newfoundland. Using that meetup, readings, and interviews from the CBC archives, he made this Ideas episode. It's called The Lives of Women, Readers, and Alice Monroe, and it's introduced by then-host Paul Kennedy. But it starts with the voice of the author herself. This is what really interests me and what draws me

and what is the most important thing about writing fiction, I think. Not to dissect people, but to come as close as you can and to celebrate, that almost sounds like a religious point of view to celebrate the essential mystery so i think this is why i said in the last story in the book i was almost glad it was a story about my mother and this is probably the most painful subject that i can deal with subject that I can deal with. On a cold autumn evening in St. John's, Newfoundland, six women gather for a book club.

Five of them are regulars at this book club, and on this occasion they've invited a friend of Alice Munro's to join them, the novelist Joan Clark. They bring salad, snacks, wine and tea to fuel an evening of questions about Alice Munro's writing and to explore how her stories illuminate their own lives. OK, I'll have some crackers and cheese for good. Turn to slippers. My name is Janet Goodall. Janet is our organizational queen. She's in charge of sending out the emails and soliciting suggestions about books and organizing every month.

I'm Rhonda. Rhonda is my best friend, completely immersed in the world of babies and having babies. Yeah, always have kids around. I'm Jane Bannister. Jane's a mother of three, and she's a breastfeeding guru. I'm Michelle Porter. Michelle's my really good friend. I joined the group about three years ago. I invited her to join book club. My name is Erin Holland.

We have Erin, who is the newest to the book club, and she doesn't have any children at all and isn't married, which is, you know, completely unusual for the book club. Well, I'm Joan Clark, a fiction writer. You know, there's a certain amount of monotony that comes with being a stay-at-home mom with non-verbal children, kids who can't speak yet, or kids who can speak but they want you to say the same thing over and over again. There's a certain amount of, yeah, patience required, I guess, and you have to kind of stimulate it in other ways in the evenings with book clubs

or reading club or whatever it is that kind of feeds your brain and your soul. While mom was napping with the baby, the two-year-old was jamming pomegranate seeds up her nose, so dad got to handle that. When the kid's always around, you don't get a chance to actually talk. You talk in 30-second spurts and then the kids interrupt you

or you have to go pick them up or drop them offsecond spurts and then the kids interrupt you or you have to go pick them up or drop them off or the kids in the playground start fighting. Did you take a taste? No. Is it? Not yet. Okay. When we talk about books, we'll often talk about how it resonates with our lives or our experiences. Janet, how long has the book club been on the go? We all met doing at Mother Goose originally. I would say that it's more comfortable. It's less academic, and we're communicating. And sometimes we get into some real stuff, which is nice.

But I think it's more intimate and more about getting together with some girls than it is about dissecting the literature. It's probably a modern-day support group. Day Support group. You've said that you can read your stories, not quite from the inside out, but you compare the structure of your stories to that of a house in which you can come in at any room, you say. Do you really think people can do that? I hope so.

I said in the article that you picked up that this is the way I read stories. And since then, all sorts of people have said to me, do you really read that way? Isn't it terrible? The poor author has worked and worked. Well, I say, well, I know about that. And yes, I go into a story that way because I don't go in to find out what happens. And I would assume this is the way some people must read me.

You go in to find yourself in a certain environment, a certain climate, whatever. It's very hard to find the right words to describe what I mean. But what I want from a story is a kind of texture, a created world. I don't, what is happening in the story, the content, you know, you say, this story is about this and that, but that isn't what I'm interested in. I'm not interested in what it's about in that narrow sense.

Narrow sense. It's the world it creates for me. And I would think a lot of readers read that way. It's really wonderful to hear Alice Munro talking about her own writing. That's amazing to think about it as a house. As I'm gone back to do my PhD and I'm studying home and house. So to hear that analogy for her stories, to me, it just opens new doors in my mind. It's wonderful.

So welcome, book club. We call our book club the I haven't finished the book club because all of us, with the exception of Erin, as she mentioned, have children and busy lives. And although we want to get to the literature and the books that we want to read, we sometimes don't get to it by the time we have the book club, but we get together and meet over food and laugh and talk anyway. Well, I guess we're going to go to Miles City, Montana first. The story is very, very rich. See, Alice's stories are so difficult to sum up.

She just pointed it out. Yes. How do you sum up? You want to find something. How do you sum up? But really, Miles City, Montana, is a story about parenting, about being parents and being children. My father came across the field carrying the body of the boy who'd been drowned. There were several men together returning from the search, but he was the one carrying the body.

The boy's name was Steve Gawley. He was eight years old. His hair and clothes were mud-colored now and carried some bits of dead leaves, twigs, and grass. He was like a heap of refuse that had been left out all winter. His face was churned into my father's chest, but I could see a nostril, an ear, plugged up with greenish mud. No, I don't think so. I don't think I really saw this. I would not have been allowed to get close enough to see something like it in his nostril.

I must have heard someone talking about that and I imagine that I saw it. I remember that I was holding one flower, a white narcissist. I was wearing white ribbed stockings which were disgustingly itchy and wrinkled at the knees and ankles. The feeling of these stockings on my legs is mixed up with another feeling in my memory. It's hard to describe. It had to do with my parents, adults in general, but my parents in particular. I felt a furious and sickening disgust. Children sometimes have an excess of disgust concerning adults. The size, the lumpy shapes, the bloated power, the breath, the coarseness, the hairiness, the horrid secretions. But this was more. And the accompanying anger had nothing sharp and self-respecting about it.

It could not be understood or expressed, though it died down after a while into a heaviness, and just a taste, an occasional taste, a thin, familiar misgiving. I was very interested in the story about her bringing in the Steve Ghali. So I was curious about what you think she's saying about parenting. Well, she certainly holds, as a child, holds the adults in her life responsible. Although not the child's father.

Yes, why doesn't she do that? I think because it seemed to me that he was never expected to or never seemed to be responsible for his son. He just kind of lets them run wild. And the mother died, right? The mother died and the son sort of ended up with him by accident. Do you think there really is,

is there a special connection between moms and children? Like, do you guys feel that way with your kids? Yeah. Well, yeah. Yeah. You did know Alice Munro. Yeah. And you have a history of her, knowledge of her.

I've been curious. How much of these stories are Alice Munro's life? I just had to stop, actually, when I read through all the stories, and I thought, curious how much of these stories are Alice Monroe's life? I just had to stop actually when I read through all the stories and I thought no I need to stop and do a read a biography or you know start finding out some background stuff because yeah it did feel like a lot of it was telling her

own story well I think that's both true and untrue as Margaret Lawrence famously said you know you write about what you know, but that doesn't mean you're literally writing about your family. It's more likely the situations and more likely her stories from her parents. She's written extensively, as you know, about her mother in particular. My perspective of it is that she is all about women. I do think women are in the foreground of her stories.

And she gives voice to a lot of experiences and feelings that women go through that are not necessarily otherwise voiced. And she does it brilliantly, where you can relate to whether you felt it before, whether it be your relationship with your mother, or your relationship with your grandmother, or your relationship with your children, or your relationship with your husband, or your friends, whether it be your relationship with your mother or your relationship with your grandmother or your relationship with your children or your relationship with your husband or your friends, whatever it is, there's some piece of the story that you can relate to. And it gets right down to the bones. She can get right to that feeling, that gut feeling like, wow, that's amazingly well-written that I can feel that again. I know exactly what she's talking about. Now, whether

or not she does that for men, I don't know. I want the stories to keep going on. I want the story to exist somewhere that in a way it's still happening or happening over and over again. I don't want it to be shut up in the book and put away. Oh, well, that's what happened. I think things change. That's really one of the things that interests me so much in writing and in observing people is just that things keep changing. Cherished beliefs change. Ways of dealing with life change. The importance of certain things in life changes, and all this seems to me just endlessly interesting. I think that is the thing that

doesn't change, or that I certainly hope doesn't change. If you find life interesting, it just, it goes on being so. As I said, the constant happiness is curiosity. I think it's all muddled up. Happiness, sadness, depression, elation. It doesn't matter if they smell bad or good. Is somebody laughing? Rhonda, she's always very positive. Yeah, and she, I didn't know if I should say it or not, but she lost her husband.

It's only been a few months, actually. That's what we lost, the little joker. Right away. He died of a heart attack riding his bike home on her birthday. Want to put on your tap shoes, Mary? None of us could imagine having to deal with the sudden death of our spouse. She's just done really well with it. She's pretty amazing, very strong. And supporting her through that experience has made us closer,

much closer than we were before, I think. No, the kids are doing good. They're doing pretty good. It hasn't been that long. The hardest part is just to talk about stuff like, you know, she said this today or he did this. Yeah, that's the part that's really hard. We all went to her home at different times

but yeah, we all came up with this really big present for her and it was really nice to be able to do something. I don't tend to talk that much in a group. I'm more of a, you know a one-on-one kind of in my kitchen for really personal stuff, or I just keep it to myself. But I mean, personal, but maybe not that intimately personal stuff doesn't really come out in the group. Yeah.

I think as Canadians, we don't like to claim a whole lot as being ourselves, as being Canadian. My husband likes to laugh and call it Canadian politeness. We're very polite. But that's, in Alice's writing, it's a little bit different than that, a little bit deeper than that. And I would think that some of the women's friendships, the very careful way they negotiate the things they talk about and the things they don't talk about, they're starting fairly relaxed relationships, but there's clearly things that these women

aren't actually talking with each other about. And that really struck me in Alice's writing yet if I'm reading books about women from other places there's a lot more open conversation about yeah it's really difficult to watch a friend face those things Face those things. I had made peanut butter and marmalade sandwiches for the children and salmon and mayonnaise for us. But I had not put any lettuce in, and Andrew was disappointed. She's written a lot about the relationships between men and women.

Betrayal, passion, they could be almost any time. Well, Miles City, Montana is about marriage, of course. To a great extent, I would say, mostly about marriage. I didn't have any. Couldn't you have got some? I'd have had to buy a whole head of lettuce just to get enough for sandwiches, and I decided it wasn't worth it.

This was a lie I had forgotten. It's like a seesaw, sort of. You know, back and forth, you know, back and forth. They're a whole lot better with lettuce. I didn't think it made that much difference. Don't be mad. I'm not mad. I like lettuce on sandwiches.

The tension, a lot of tension in Miles City, Montana. I just didn't think it mattered that much. How would it be if I didn't bother to fill up the gas tank? That's not the same thing. You just get this sense that this man and wife driving in this car, you know, do they even like one another? Are they, on this particular time, are they just tolerating one another? And you wonder, well, how long will this last?

Sing a song, said Cynthia. She started to sing. Five little ducks went out one day Over the hills and far away One little duck went quack, quack, quack Four little ducks came swimming back Andrew squeezed my hand and said, Let's not fight.

You're right. I should have got lettuce. It doesn't matter that much. I wish that I could get my feelings about Andrew to come together into a serviceable and dependable feeling. Sometimes the very sound of his footsteps seemed to me tyrannical, the set of his mouth smug and mean, his hard, straight body a barrier interposed, quite consciously, even dutifully and with a nasty pleasure in its masculine authority, between me and whatever joy or lightness I could get in life. Then, without much warning,

he became my good friend and most essential companion. I would think how humble he was, really, taking on such a ready-made role of husband, father, breadwinner, and how I myself, in comparison, was really a secret monster of egotism. Not so secret either. Not from him. I haven't seen Andrew for years. Don't know if he's still thin, has gone completely grey, insists on lettuce, tells the truth,

or is hardy and disappointed. Yeah, they're just talking about what happened and then suddenly she just throws in, I haven't seen Andrew for years. I'm like, I just like the way she did that. Do tell us Janie do you see the future at the same time as the planet? yeah well it was how she handles time

because the way she moves back and forth in time of course you don't even notice it it's so subtle but she's a master of working through time. How did you get to know? Alice? Oh, well,

I was living in Calgary at the time when she came to the BAMF Center and she was there. And the only reason I went was because she was there, because I had read all her work, and I just thought she is the fiction writer in this country, especially for short stories.

But I was completely convinced that she would be the one who would win the Nobel Prize. I've always read everything of hers at least three times. And the last time I did a writer residency, I would say to all the writers who read Alice Munro, and read her three times, read her first for pleasure, and then read her for how she handles time,

and then point of view, how she shifts point of view. You don't even know she's shifting from one point of view to another. And I'm not just talking about the point of view, how she shifts point of view. You don't even know she's shifting from one point of view to another. And I'm not just talking about the point of view of characters, I'm talking about the authorial point of view. Now I wish I'd read them all three times.

One of them twice, I had a time. But I did get a lot out of it the second time. Yeah. As for me, I was happy because of the shedding. I love taking off. In my own house, I seem to be often looking for a place to hide, sometimes from the children, but more often from the jobs to be done and the phone ringing and the sociability of the neighbourhood.

And what I liked in this story and in some of the other stories is when she's talking a little bit about life as a mother of young children, like when she's talking about going on the trip and how much she really enjoyed getting out of the phone ringing and the sociability of the neighborhood. She wanted to hide so that I could get busy. I wanted to hide so that I could get busy at my real work, which was a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself.

I lived in a state of siege, always losing just what I wanted to hold on to. But on trips there was no difficulty. I could be talking to Andrew, talking to the children, and looking at whatever they wanted me to look at. A pig on a sign, a pony in a field, a Volkswagen on a revolving stand. And all the time those bits and pieces would be flying together inside me. This made me hopeful and lighthearted. It was being a watcher that did it.

A watcher, not a keeper. I lived in a state of siege, always losing just what I wanted to hold onto, which is just so descriptive of my life right now. And I'm just trying to put two thoughts together with a little two year old saying, Mama, up, up, up. And I was just trying to write some notes about a story. And just many other things. That's exactly, that's where she was, precisely where she was. She was into a story in her head and she wanted to go in and continue with it. I just really loved seeing that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. She's quite a bit about writing actually in her work, about the space she's in. Yeah. Or not in. It really made me feel so normal. She said she enjoyed being a watcher, not a keeper. Yeah. I have that all written. I have all the whole picture on my mind.

Yeah, yeah. She's going to star besides us. I have to watch and I have to look after people. In this story, she feels like she's not entirely part of the suburban milieu in a way. She's not really sure where she's supposed to be. This shedding. I was happy because of this shedding. I love taking off.

In my own house, I seem to often look for a hiding place. I like that. It's what it is. It's like, why are you going to book club? Because I can leave. Leave. A little bit. Yeah. Where are you going, Mom? Out. I'm going to a place where I can finish the sentence. Except. I think it's forgotten now. We can't remember the main character in the book. But, I can finish the whole sentence. You know, she used to, in the early days when she had kids,

she used to write, this is when they were living in B.C., between the washer and the dryer. And that just inspired me so much. You're listening to Ideas, where a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio,

across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National. Find us wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyad. Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goldtar, and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and, most of all, true crime podcasts. But sometimes, I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast, Crime Story, comes in. Every week, I go behind the scenes with

the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. Today, you're hearing an episode originally broadcast in 2017 called The Lives of Women, Readers, and Alice Munro. We're replaying it today to honour Alice Munro, who died Tuesday in Port Hope, Ontario, at the age of 92. It features a book club in St. John's, Newfoundland, along with clips of archival conversations with Alice Munro and readings from her short stories.

You first published at 35? Well, I first published a book at 35. I began to publish stories, oh, when I was about 18, I think, when I was still at university. And then I thought, you know, it was going to be clear sailing, and I'd publish a story every couple of months. Instead, I published a story about every three or four years, and the rest of the time I sent out the manuscripts and they came back. So I was working pretty steadily, but not very successfully.

I very early on got the notion that my real life had to be hidden. It had to be protected. I didn't think that you could go to your teacher or your parents and tell them what you really thought about anything. I thought that I knew that was a bad idea. So I got used to this quite early, and I didn't need encouragement or reassurance. I just, I suppose, lived a very deceptive life. But it didn't bother me.

All right. Being a woman has changed tremendously. And Alice talks about that a lot. How, how, in your observation, has it changed from what Alice writes or from your? Because we're saying we read these stories, and we see so much that's similar to what we go through or feel. Well, when I was growing up, and I grew up in Liverpool, Nova Scotia, making up stories was not something that could be taken seriously. Because you're a woman or just in general? I would say in general, but I think if a man said it, it would be taken more seriously than if a young woman said it. I knew a couple of fathers

who did not believe that their daughters should be educated after high school because they would just go off and get married. It was a waste of money. But I mean, at Alice's time, I mean, the same thing would have held true at that period of time, too. Choices of future. Yeah, yeah.

And yet even with all these choices we have, we still grapple with these relationships and this parenting and all that. That's interesting. Yeah, yeah. I was always going to be a mother. That was always in the plans. And it came to my attention pretty quickly, pretty early on, that I started to realize that in order for the house to function and for my youngest to have a stable household, I needed to be that stability. I needed to be home.

And so I see a lot of value. So sure, there's struggles with where do you fit a career into that? I didn't. I didn't even try after a while. I figured it wasn't almost worth it. I was never forced. There was never a, you have to stay home. Women today, women have more choice now. But if and when we become mothers, there's no choice in that.

It's something that consumes you. With motherhood, there's a whole other set of roles and expectations. And the biology of it, the physicality, the physical reality of being a mother and breastfeeding day in, day out. It is a role that is still that role that is shoved on you. role that is, it's still that role that is shoved on you. Helena, an old silver mining town, looked forlorn to us even in the morning sunlight. These busy prosaic cities reminded me of similar places in Ontario, and I thought about what was really waiting there. The great tombstone furniture of Roger and Caroline's dining room.

The dinners for which I must iron the children's dresses and warn them about forks, and then the other table a hundred miles away, the jokes of my father's crew. I think mothering today isn't as prescribed for a lot of mothers as it used to be, I don't think. But the themes in Alice Munro's stories are still there, the marriages, the relationships, the navigating, the aging relationships with the parents, and it's still a big theme in women's lives.

What are we doing this for, I thought. And the answer came, to show off. To give Andrew's mother and my father the pleasure of seeing their grandchildren. That was our duty. But beyond that, we wanted to show them something. What strenuous children we were, Andrew and I. What relentless seekers of approbation.

I feel like as a group of Canadian women who love to read, I think we could assume that, well, of course, we all would have read Alison Roe, because how could you not? But I had not until I read these stories, read any Alison Roe. But having read her, what has impressed you? Well, certainly some of the things that you were talking about, the time, the voice, the clarity with which she describes things. And I'm really excited because actually one thing

that also separates me from the group, as I sit way over here in the computer, is that I'm not a mother. And I found that when I was from the group, as I sit way over here in the comfy chair, is that I'm not a mother. And I found that when I was reading the stories, the parts that were familiar to me, the relationship of the narrator with her aging mother, you know, like, that really resonated with me. She writes a lot about her mother.

Yeah. So many, so many stories about her mother. So... Yeah. I had never had any sort of academic chance to read it. I read The Lives of Girls and Women when I think I was too young to read it almost, because I found a lot of the sexuality really disturbing, and I had to kind of put it aside. So I think I might have been in high school, so maybe it wasn't quite the time to do it. And so, yeah, this was the

first time coming back to it. But you don't have to be, she's writing for anybody who coming back to it. But you don't have to be... She's writing for anybody who can read. You don't have to have an academic background at all to read her. We're certainly not an academic book club. That's for sure. And she quit the University of Western Ontario

to marry Jim Monroe. I think, was it her third year or the end of her second year or something? Yeah, or she didn't have a scholarship to go back. You know. Wikipedia. I love knowing more information. Well, it was a very difficult relationship. Mothers and daughters generally have fairly

complex relationships, and this was made much more so by the fact that my mother was ill. She had Parkinson's disease, which was not diagnosed for a long time and which has very peculiar symptoms anyway, so that it can seem in the beginning like a neurotic, self-chosen affliction. It also then has rather bizarre effects later on. The voice becomes thickened and eating becomes difficult. There's no control over saliva. There are lots of things that are very difficult for a teenager to face in a parent. It made me very, I suppose, self-protective. I couldn't allow pity to

enter into the relationship because, for one thing, I didn't want to get trapped in families like ours. It is the oldest daughter's job to stay home and look after people when they're in this situation until they die. I instead got a scholarship and went to university. Well, there is enormous guilt about doing that, but at the time, you're so busy protecting yourself that you simply don't, you push it under, and then you suffer from it later on. The problem, the only problem, is my mother. And she is the one, of

course, that I am trying to get. It is to reach her that this whole journey has been undertaken. With what purpose? To mark her off. To describe. To illumine. To celebrate, to get rid of her. And it did not work, for she looms too close, just as she always did. You always draw from personal experience. I mean, what else could you do, really? I think she's cute in her knowledge of people, and she writes a great deal out of her own experience, as you know, I mean, about her mother.

She keeps revisiting her mother. She is heavy as always. She weighs everything down, and yet she is indistinct. Her edges melt and flow, which means she has stuck to me as close as ever and refused to fall away, and I could go on and on, applying what skills I have, using what tricks I know,

and it would always be the same. I think this is not just with mothers who are ill, but with all mothers and daughters. By the time the daughter gets enough feeling of herself that she doesn't feel threatened by her mother, that her mother is not going to change her into somebody that her mother wants her to be, then quite often the mother is dead. Because to get to be this kind of person, you're probably 45, 50 years old. To be this kind of person, you're probably 45, 50 years old.

There were straight roads here in little farming towns with grain elevators. Essentially, they're very domestic stories, you know, from home, you know, from home and relatives of rural people in Ontario. In fact, there was a sign announcing that this county we were going through, Douglas County, had the second highest wheat yield of any county in the United States. Why do I love it so much? Is it because it isn't scenery? It reminds you of home, said Andrew, a bout of severe nostalgia. But he said this kindly.

You grew up on a turkey and fox farm. Well, it was a fox farm when I was a very small child, and then it became a fox and mink farm, and after the Second World War, my father became a poultry farmer. Chickens, then turkeys. When we said home and meant Ontario, we had very different places in mind. The way it's imprinted her, you know, growing up, she's writing about a rural area,

you know, the Clinton area in Ontario and Vancouver. It's very, very centred in place. My home was a turkey farm, where my father lived as a widower. Andrew did not like to go there, naturally enough, because he was not the sort who could sit around the kitchen table with a turkey crew telling jokes. I could manage those jokes, but it was an effort. I could manage those jokes, but it was an effort. Once, shortly after my mother died and after I was married,

in fact, I was packing to join Andrew in Vancouver, I was at home alone for a couple of days with my father. There was a freakishly heavy rain all night. In the early light, we saw that the turkey field was flooded. We went out in an old rowboat we had. I thought that if Andrew could see me there in the rain, red-handed, muddy, trying to hold on to turkey legs and row the boat at the same time, he would only want to get me out of there and make me forget about it. This raw life angered him. My attachment to it angered him. I thought that I shouldn't have married him. But who else? One of the turkey crew? And I didn't want to stay there. I might feel bad about leaving, but I would feel worse if somebody made me stay. so how much from what you know of alice monroe yes how much of this reflects what happened in

her life quite a bit yeah yeah so would this be maybe talking a little bit about her divorce the way the trips she made with her kids yeah and you know the thing is that if she was here and listening to this she would laugh off a lot because no writer wants to be pinned down a fiction writer in particular she's writing fiction and so but the truths that she are in her work are definitely those that have come out of her life and the way she's lived it. No question about that. I mean, I know both her husbands, actually, but her second husband, of course, she was married to him much longer,

Gerald Fremlin, he was a geographer. He died of cancer. She was married to him a long time, 35 years or something like that. And to Jim Monroe, it was considerably fewer than that. Yeah. She was much more compatible with her second husband than she was with her first. Before we talk about it,

why don't we listen to this piece that I found on the internet that Alice Munner talks about the mosaics and how she puts different layers of her pieces together. I mean, your stories are getting very, very complex. I was thinking it's a bit like a three-dimensional chess game sometimes. There are so many layers of things going on, and cross-cutting and time

and memory, and or it's like a pile of snapshots that are all shuffled up. Why do you do that? I just like to. I can't get a grasp on what I'm trying to talk about unless I do that. I don't do it to make things difficult, and I don't do it to... Oh, I don't know.

I think it's because I've been doing it as I get older, so you might think it's the challenge of writing this way, but I don't think that's true. It's that I see things now in this way, but I don't think that's true. It's that I see things now in this way, and there is absolutely no other way I can deal with the material of fiction. No other way I can deal with the material of fiction. Very good. I like that, because that's mostly what I like about her writing is that it's like a really visual person and I like photographs

and she calls it a pile of snapshots that have been shuffled up. I like that about her writing. It's very visual. I'm a descendant of a pioneer family and there are quite sensible ideas in such families that it's very important for people to know how to do physical work. And so I was trained to do domestic jobs as the most important thing that I would ever have to do. And also I lived in an environment where there weren't labor-saving devices, there weren't for a lot of people, but we

didn't have running water or anything like that. So the idea was that I would have to learn to work hard. And actually, there were stories in the community. We all read in our house, but it was seen as a luxury, something you did when everything else was done. And there were stories in the community about women who had become readers in the way that they might take up drinking and how the men would come in from the fields and there would be cold grease in the frying pan and no dinner ready and there would be fluff balls as big as your head under the beds

and it would all be because the women read. And I've no doubt this happened and that kind of reading was probably a total escape, you know. They probably read romances and things about royalty and stuff like that, the sort of stuff I like to read sometimes myself. I love reading. I love reading. I love a good story. I love escaping into a story. I love meeting new characters and, you know,

almost feeling like they're your friends for a while, and then I love into a story. I love meeting new characters and almost feeling like they're your friends for a while. And then I love sharing a story. I wondered sometimes if when the kids were little, little, little, it was an escape. I wouldn't necessarily say that I read for escape. I read just to reorient myself. One of the geniuses of Alice Munro is she doesn't write too much.

She's not necessarily telling us what to think. She leaves enough unsaid, and she leaves the questions. She leads you to the questions and leaves you to answer them on your own. In Miles City, said Cynthia in the tones of an incantation, there is a beautiful blue swimming pool for children and a park with lovely trees. Andrew said to me, you could have started something. But there was a pool. There were no shouts or splashes.

Over the entrance, I saw a sign that said the pool was closed every day from noon until two o'clock. It was then twenty-five after twelve. A girl came out wearing a red lifeguard's shirt over her bathing suit. Is it just those two? The girl said. Just the two. We'll watch them. I can't let any adults in. If it's just the two, I guess I could watch them. I'm having my lunch, she said to Cynthia. Do you want to come in the pool?

Yes, please, said Cynthia firmly. Andrew and I sat in the car with the windows open. I could hear a radio playing and thought it must belong to the girl or her boyfriend. I was thirsty and got out of the car. I saw a drinking fountain at the other side of the park and was walking toward it in a roundabout way, keeping to the shade of the trees. No place became real till you got out of the car.

I paid attention to a squashed leaf, ground a popsicle stick under the heel of my sandal, squinted at a trash can strapped to a tree. This is the way you look at the poorest details of the world resurfaced after you've been driving for a long time. You feel their singleness and precise location, and the forlorn coincidence of your being there to see them. Where are the children? I turned around and moved quickly, not quite running, to a part of the fence beyond which the cement wall was not completed. I saw Cynthia. I thought by her pose, her discretion, the look on her face, that she must be watching some by-play between the lifeguard and her boyfriend.

I couldn't see Meg. Cynthia, where's Meg? It always seems to me when I recall this scene that Cynthia churns very gracefully toward me, then churns all around in the water, making me think of a ballerina on point, and spreads her arms in a gesture of the stage. Disappeared!

I cried out for Andrew, and the lifeguard came into view. She was pointing toward the deep end of the pool, saying, What's that? There, just within my view, a cluster of pink ruffles appeared, a bouquet beneath the surface of the water. Why would a lifeguard stop and point? Why would she ask what that was? Why didn't she just dive into the water and swim to it? She didn't swim. She ran all the way around the edge of the pool. But by that time, Andrew was over the fence.

The drama was over. Andrew had got to Meg first and had pulled her out of the water. He was carrying her now, and the lifeguard was trotting along behind. What had happened was that Meg had climbed out of the water at the shallow end and run along the edge of the pool toward the deep end. She saw a comb that somebody had dropped lying on the bottom. She crouched down and reached in to pick it up, quite deceived about the depth of the water. She went over the edge and slipped into the pool, making such a light splash that nobody heard, not the lifeguard who was kissing her boyfriend or Cynthia who was watching them. That must have been the moment under the trees when I thought, where are the children?

It must have been the same moment. At that moment, Meg was slipping, surprised, into the treacherously clear blue water. Suppose I hadn't had the impulse just at that moment to check on the children. Okay, anyway, questions? Yeah, so I'm curious to know about how you saw that in this story, but also what are your experiences both as mothers with your children, but also as daughters with your parents?

I'm going to jump in for a second. There's something I read. It was on Facebook, where we all get our news, of course, daughters with your your to jump in for a second there's something i read um and i it was you know on facebook where we get i'll get our news of course but it was a link to a little male article and it's a woman who was writing about the fact that when she was a child she looked to parents and how she thought they were the authority and everything that was going on and they you know knew what was going on and then as a 40 year old parent she's like everyone's just weighing it no one really knows what we're doing right so i weighing it. I feel like you expect that you're

going to get to this point where you sort of reach a level where you understand things and know how things are working and things will all be sort of sorted out and we don't I haven't gotten there yet. I don't think we do. No quasi adults forever. We're weighing it. You remember that feeling that comfortable feeling as a child, looking at your mother in particular for me. Oh, yeah. But looking at your mother and just feeling like that was, yeah, that was a place of security and knowledge and sure, sureness, something sure.

Listen to mom. She knows what's going on. Yeah. She doesn't have a clue. But she's doing a great job of pretending. When I stood apart from my parents at Steve Gawley's funeral and watched them and had this new unpleasant feeling about them, I thought that I was understanding something about them for the first time.

It was a deadly serious thing. I was understanding that they were implicated. Their big, stiff, dressed-up bodies did not stand between me and sudden death or any kind of death. They gave consent, so it seemed. They gave consent to the death of children, and to my death not by anything they said or thought, but by the very fact that they had made children.

They had made me. They had made me, and for that reason my death, however grieved they were, however they carried on, would seem to them anything but impossible or unnatural. This was a fact, and even then I knew they were not to blame. But I did blame them. I charged them with effrontery, hypocrisy, on Steve Gawley's behalf and on behalf of all children.

What I can't get over, said Andrew, is how you got the signal. It's got to be some kind of extra sense that mothers have. What I can't understand, I said, is how you got over the fence. Neither can I. So we went on, with the two in the back seat trusting us, because of no choice, and we ourselves trusting to be forgiven, in time, for everything that had first to be seen and condemned by those children.

Whatever was flippant, arbitrary, careless, callous, all are natural and particular mistakes. I want to move away from what happened to the possibility of this happening or that happening and a kind of idea that life is not just made up of the facts, the things that happen, but all the things that happen in fantasy, the things that might have happened, things that happen in fantasy, the things that might have happened, the kind of alternate life that can almost seem to be accompanying what we call our real lives. And I wanted to get all that sort of working together, alternate reality.

I couldn't sit down and read it beginning to end. I need more time with each Monroe short story than... Oh, I'm glad you feel that way. I don't think you should read more than one story at a time. I don't think anybody should. And then you should take a week to recover. So there's a 28-week book. Well. Yeah, I think our next meeting will be in January.

Yeah, okay. Because it's just, we're getting into crazy time. It's too busy right now. Okay, who's going to take what food here? Yes, we should remember that. Okay, who's, would you like to take that cake with you? The fruit cake? You loved it so. Because you loved it, and you think, and I know Jane. When I'm reading a book, I have long sort of assumed that everybody is reading it the same way I am. Going to a book club kills that assumption.

It doesn't have one meaning. It doesn't have one thing to learn. It doesn't have one story. It's so many things together. And that's what leaves you thinking about it for a long time afterwards. Thank you, everyone, for coming. It was great to see you all. Thank you, Erin and Michelle.

Thank you, Michelle. It was awesome. Good night, everyone. Bye. It was great to see you all. Thank you, Michelle. Good night, everyone. You know her increasingly. Her short stories have become more novelistic. Her last two or three books, you read a short story that's probably 40, 50 pages, and it's like a novel. It's novelistic. Everything's there, and you don't need to know any more about that situation and that story. It's novelistic. Everything's there. And you don't need to know any more about that situation and that story. It's all there. I sometimes think I can press things too much, you know. I get short stories where other people would get novels. What you do is you write a book of 13 novels and call them short stories. Sometimes I feel that's it, yes. Sometimes I feel that everything can be said

in a short story that I would say in a novel. You've been listening to an Ideas episode originally broadcast in 2017 called The Lives of Women, Readers and Alice Munro. It featured the members of a book club in St. John's, Newfoundland with their guest novelist Joan Clark. You also heard Alice Munro interviews

from the CBC archives and readings from her short stories by Samira Moyadin. Music by Oliver Schroer. The episode was produced in 2017 by Battery Radio. Chris Brooks was Jean-Claude Conner. Web producer for Ideas is Lisa Ayuso. Technical help today from Laura Antonelli. Acting senior producer, Lisa Godfrey.

The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.