The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Alice Munro: What Will Be Remembered?

Episode Date: May 23, 2024

Nobel laureate Alice Munro is widely known as a master of the short story, and one of Canada's most celebrated and beloved writers. In fact, Huron County in Ontario is often called Alice Munro Country. The outpouring of affection for her following her death, last week at age 92 only highlights the relatability of her characters and the precision of her fiction. And so we've gathered some writers who in one way or another have been affected by Ms. Munro's life and work. We welcome: Heather O'Neill, author of "Lullabies for Little Criminals" and the forthcoming, "The Capital of Dreams;" Chanel Sutherland, winner of the 2022 CBC Short Story Prize;Katherine Govier, author of "The Three Sisters Bar & Hotel;" Magdalene Redekop, author of "Mothers and Other Clowns: The Stories of Alice Munro;"and Menaka Raman-Wilms, author of "The Rooftop Garden," and host of the Globe and Mail's Decibel podcast.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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In fact, Huron County in Ontario is often called Alice Munro Country. The outpouring of affection for her following her death last week at age 92 only highlights the relatability of her characters and the precision of her fiction. And so we've gathered some writers who, in one way or or another have been affected by Alice Munro's life and work. Let's welcome on the line via Zoom in Montreal, Quebec, Heather O'Neill, author of Lullabies for Little Criminals and the forthcoming The Capital of Dreams. And Chanel Sutherland, winner of the 2022 CBC Short Story Prize and working on her first short story collection. And with us here in the studio, Catherine Gauvier, author of The Three Sisters Bar and Hotel. Magdalene Redikop, professor emeritus, graduate faculty, Victoria College, and author of Mothers and Other Clowns, The Stories of Alice Munro.

and Other Clowns, the Stories of Alice Munro. And Meneka Raman-Wilms, author of The Rooftop Garden and host of The Globe and Mail's Decibel podcast. And it's great to have you three here in our studio and to our friends in Points Beyond in Montreal. Great to have you for this discussion as well. We need to say a couple of things off the top. Number one, Catherine Gauvier had hip replacement eight days ago and she is here in our studio. That is me. That gets big props. I'm telling you, that is fantastic. And number two, I have to ask Maggie Redikop, who was your favorite student 45 years ago at U of T taking 20th century English from you? I think it must have been Steve Peake. I think you're right. I think you're absolutely right. Hey, I didn't miss my cue.

We waited 45. We did not plan that, but I'm glad you got the right answer. So there we go. It's great 45 years later, finally, to have you on this program. I want to, okay, Chanel, start us off here. I want to get everybody's personal connection to Alice Munro off the top. What would you say is yours? So I was introduced to Munro's writing at an early age, early high school, I think. It was lives of girls and women. And I was two years into my life in Canada and had just become a teenager and all the complex feelings and emotions that come with that.

And as a young immigrant to Quebec, to Canada, you know, I was navigating in a country that was completely different than the small village that I grew up in on the small Caribbean island of St. Vincent. So I spent a lot of time alone during those early days. And I spent a lot of time in a library. And I think it was a librarian that actually handed me a Monroe's book. And by reading her book, I was able to, A, you know, find commonality between me and the female characters, especially the ones that were my age. And also it was about, you know, they were set in small town Ontario, which is not that different than the village that I grew up in. There were a lot of similarities between the characters that we meet, the relationships that were happening in the stories.

So, yeah, so that's how I became, you know, that's how I was introduced to Monroe's writing. Fabulous. Heather, how about you? that's how I was introduced to Monroe's writing. Fabulous. Heather, how about you? I first, of course, I had known the name, but I first read her when I was at McGill University, and I took a class in Canadian literature written by women, and it was a syllabus of 20 or 25 writers, and it was a huge class, one of these survey classes,

with 400 students and the very last day of the our semester then the professor came in and she said you know it's quite remarkable because every single student in this 400 to capacity class has chosen to write their final essay on alice monroe and it really struck me how there is something in her writing that responded to that everybody in the class connected to it. And, you know, it was a class just filled with young women. And when you read Alice Munro, you think she's really so intimate, such an intimate experience. existential loneliness of being a young woman and having sort of a lack of resources and having to make these decisions on your own that in everybody kind of curtails them and acts as though you're

mad every time you do anything for your own happiness so for me it seems like such a unique take but everybody else in the class too was like yes I also love that idea that a young woman has the entire world and deserves the entire world, despite what everyone's telling her. Lovely. Professor Redikoff, you not only liked her a great deal, you knew her and you decided to write a book about her. So where did the connection come from in the first place? Well, I didn't know her when I decided to write the book about her. So in a way, my whole connection has been, I would say, uncanny in a way because of the connections that happened. Because before I ever thought of writing a book on Alice Munro,

I did my PhD dissertation on James Hogg, having no idea that he's related to her. So then that was the first uncanny thing. And so then when I was in Scotland, after I had started to write, I was out of randomly, I was asked by Methuen, which is now Routledge, British Press, to write a book for their series on women authors. And I could choose either Atwood or Monroe. And I had already published a bit on Atwood and there were a lot of people publishing about her. So I decided I'll choose Monroe because she's the bigger challenge, I thought. And so that's what I did. And then when I was in Scotland for a Hogg conference, somebody said, well, you're not going

to work on Hogg anymore? What are you working on? And I said, Alice Monroe. And they said, oh, she's related to James Hogg. And I said, no, you're kidding me. So that was the first uncanny connection. When I came back, I was working on the book and finally got up my courage to write her a letter and said, you know, can this be true? And I got a, and I sent her also very, very, I can't marvel at my temerity.

I sent her a copy of an essay I'd written called, called, Through the Mennonite Looking Glass, which was my first piece ever writing about being a Mennonite and so she responded uh everybody will understand she responded generously to she does to young writers handwritten oh yes a hand my first handwritten letter in which she said yes it is true that she's related to James Hogg and then a wonderful p.s and I must have apologized for the writing how I had had written that piece. And she said, no, that's right for that material. She's so generous to other writers. So that was my uncanny connection.

And it kept getting uncanny. Then when my book was almost, I was towards the last of it, and I had gotten permission to have a painting by Mary Pratt called Wedding Dress on the cover of my book. I'd gone to Marigold Gallery and got that. And then suddenly I got a phone call from Douglas Gibson and said, I need to tell you a story. I'm coming to visit you on behalf of Alice Munro. And he came and he said that Alice Munro had chosen that same painting for the cover of Friend of My Youth. had chosen that same painting for the cover of Friend of My Youth. And so he was there on her behalf to ask if I would relinquish my right to it so that she could use it and in exchange I could tell the story.

So there have been other uncanny episodes like that. And I assume you did. Yes, I did. Oh, yeah, that's what's on the cover of the book. Good stuff. Good stuff. How about you? Well, Steve, I was a student also when I became aware of Alice Munro.

And it was 1972. I was doing a master's degree in English at York University. And Lives of Girls and Women had been published the year before. And I have to tell you, after being a sort of honours English student in Edmonton all those years and searching desperately through the canon for women's names, was Evelyn Waugh possibly a woman?

How about Rainer Maria Wilke? Wilke, you know. So there she was, and my thesis supervisor, my paper supervisor, was a woman called Clara Thomas. And she said, you know, this thing about Canadian women writers is becoming a real thing. We can now talk about it. This is a country that has produced and is producing a large number of women writers.

And Alice was, to me, a leading edge of women writers and Alice was to me a leading edge of that and what it meant to me was hey we can write about these things that are our experiences because we are in a special category as being women and having been girls we don't get quite the same space as everyone else. And also, she lived here. She made it possible. We didn't really have a big generation at that point of writers living in this country, writing about life in this country. So, very similar story. I also encountered Alice Munro in university. This seems to be a very common thing. Second year, Canadian literature class. Where? At U of T. And it was Who Do You Think You Are? we read.

And I remember being so struck by the writing. Just on the surface, it seemed kind of simple. But all of a sudden, all of these things were happening. And I remember being very drawn to it. After that book. I went and found more of her stories. And then, you know, I was writing short stories of my own at the time. And a few years later, I ended up winning an award from the Alice Munro Festival of the Short Story, which takes place in Southern Ontario every year. It was an award for a writer under 30. It was given out by the Toronto Arts and Letters Club. an award for a writer under 30. It was given out by the Toronto Arts and Letters Club. And it was just kind of huge to have that recognition as a young writer, you know, to see your name next to Alice Monroe's name. It was such a thrill. And it, you know,

it gave me a lot of encouragement to keep going and keep writing. Here's Marsha Lederman from the Globe and Mail writing in her column last week. Sheldon, would you bring this graphic up? It is amazing how a story can stick with you, guide you, keep you company in your loneliest and lowest of moments, help you see yourself. That was Ms. Monroe's talent, nearly universally acknowledged. Professor Redikop, I want to pick up on that, because this is not a woman who wrote about exciting adventures in New York City or the great capitals of Europe. This is a woman who wrote about exciting adventures in New York City or the great capitals of Europe. This is a woman who wrote about life in southwestern Ontario. Why do you think that resonated so much with readers?

Because it was not just about southern Ontario. Alice Monroe's subject is really the human condition. She writes about what she knows. So she writes about the people there, and she writes about her own experience with her mother. But it's not really, it's not limited to that. She resonates, well, for various reasons, because of the emotional risks she takes. She takes, it's emotionally risky to read her stories and she takes these incredible risks. But I think ultimately she resonates because there's a meme going around where people saying, how does she know that about me? And that's not, people are not saying that from Southern Ontario. There, there are, you know, oh, I can recognize myself.

But this meme, how does she know that about me? That's people like Jim Shedden or that's, you know, people like my email friends in Europe who say, how could she know that about me? All the readers, there's kind of an intimacy. And I think that's because her method is basically, it's a sort of cinematic style. I saw a quotation by Walter Murch, who is a famous film editor. And what he described, the mass intimacy that you aim for in films, is quite close to what an Alice Munro story does. That they're like more fragments of stories. They're floating around.

They're densely elusive. And there are all these gaps. It's almost like the story is unfinished. So as we would in a film, we project ourselves into that space. And we think, oh, that's me. And it reflected back to us. So it's a participatory process that resonates not just with uh in some ways i i'll go so far as to say has in a way nothing to do with the fact that it is a that she writes about ontario i mean i'm from manitoba uh the last letter i wrote her was about the story called um called soon in the juliet stories and i said to her i feel as if you wrote it for me and she wrote back and said basically sort of you know yeah i did called Soon in the Juliet stories. And I said to her, I feel as if you wrote it for me.

And she wrote back and said basically sort of, you know, yeah, I did. You know, that kind of intimacy is not, it's not because I know her. I'm very, very, very glad I did. But it's, I think that's part of why she resonates so widely. I have a friend in Maraica, do you see me? She's going to be watching this in Portugal. She said, there are whole areas of my life that I only understand because I've read Alice Munro. See, that's why I took her class 45 years ago. All that stuff right

there. Chanel, let me go to you next. You're at the beginning of what I'm sure you hope is a long literary career. What do you think you take or learn from Alice Munro that you want to apply to yourself? I think Munro is widely recognized as a master of short stories. Me personally, I just love how complex her characters are. And she's inspired me to try and create complex characters in the same sense that she does. I want my stories to be about the human experience as well. So I tend to write about very ordinary moments in people's lives. And in any point of my craft, any stage of my craft, whatever it is I'm working on,

I find myself with an Alice Munro book directly beside me because there are moments where I'll need, it's like my dictionary or my Bible. I'll go to it whenever I need inspiration or if I'm feeling, you know, particularly not, if the writing is not flowing like I would like it to. So, I mean, she's just a master of complex characters, you know, this sense of place that she does so well that I think I'll be spending the rest of my life

trying to figure out how to write as well as she does when it comes to setting in place. And then the emotional depth. I mean, I think we've all touched on that. Just being able to write about the human condition in such a way that's very personal to everyone who's reading her and being able to find yourself in her stories. I want everyone to be able to find themselves in my stories when they read it. So, like I said, she's just my Bible when I'm writing. And I think for the rest of my life I'll be using her stories because they're so relatable as a reader and as a writer for me. Meneka, when you are writing, do you channel her writing style in your head at the same time? I don't know if I would say channel, but there's certainly so many things

that I've read in her books and tried to figure out, how does she do that? Because on the surface, it seems like she's doing something very simple, but it's so complex. I remember even going back to look through stories and say,

when did she change tense or time? We're in the future now. When did we go to the future? And trying to go back and seeing how she did that transition. And it's so subtle that as a reader, you're not even noticing you're jumping around like that. But that's a really hard thing to do as a writer,

to be able to convey these complexities and not really have your reader kind of being aware of that, just being so into the story that that's all they're focused on. I wonder, Heather, when you're writing, do you also, are you reading her or when you're reading her, are you so focused on the technique and how did she do this more so than the actual story? Does that happen? It depends. You know, as a writer, I do look at what she does and how she kind of, she looks at crossroads in a woman's life,

where they made a decision that undoes does everything. And she puts like a magnifying glass on that. And then she speeds up the time. And then you see all the implications of that. And it's just overwhelming. So that's just a technique. it's an Alice Munro technique. I mean, that's why she's so unique because nobody else can do that. I allow her to do that. She's influenced me in the realm of writing about young women and the idea. I mean, I find that women's bodies and women's nudity so incredibly beautiful and the way she has these characters who seem so vulnerable. They're so feminine. They'll be naked at times, and yet within them is so much strength.

And when she presents to me a young woman character with all her tiny fingers, there's something in that that has really entered my characters, particularly when I write about them having sex. And what else is interesting though, it's her, her stories are so alive that every time you approach them at different times in your life, because I spoke about when I first encountered her when I was young and that sort of how her young characters were interacting really influenced me. But last month I decided just like that, I was going to reread all of her books because I was ill. And then going into them as a middle-aged woman, I was like so overwhelmed because when I first read them, I thought the older characters, I thought that was of a different generation. That doesn't happen to you.

I will escape that. I thought I had more freedom than I had. And then to read and understand how people did try to make me a caretaker, people tried to take my liberty away, how hard it was to fight as a woman on a daily basis for the same things Alice Munro's characters had to fight for.

And I was just weeping because it made me accept my whole life story in a different way. Heather, am I allowed to say this? You're not a middle-aged woman yet. I'm allowed to say that, aren't I? I don't think she is anyway. I mean, if I'm middle-aged and I'm a lot older than you, anyway, we're not going to do the math anymore here. Catherine, tell me this. Can men read Alice Monroe and derive as much from it as women? Well, it's a great question and

I've been listening to everyone and wondering that myself I think that if they could they'd be better off for it they should I think it would be wonderful if men had been kind of brought into the empowerment of women at the same time that women had been brought into the empowerment of women, if you know what I mean. There's been a big lag, hasn't there, in that we had all these women, I mean, a generation ahead of me, out to find their own satisfaction in sex and so on. And I think certainly in Alice's history, personal history, and in my own, it was hard to find the men who bought into that in quite the same way. Or they may have had the words for it,

but maybe not the deep understanding. So yeah, I wish men did. I think there's a lot more in Alice Munro than her kind of completely, you know, bone deep feminism. She loves the environment of southern Ontario. I mean, I'm reading them again, as Heather is. The bulrushes, the watery, you know,

the floating bridges where you can see the stars reflected. There's beautiful stuff in there about place. I think that lasts. I mean, you're talking about will this last? Will these stories last? I think that they can last and they can find a whole new audience, really, possibly among men. Well, let me follow up. I don't know, Professor Redikop, if you ever discussed or in your letters with her correspondent on the issue of whether she cared as much about whether men liked her work as women? That's a separate question, but I think she,

to go back to the first one, I think she has tremendous numbers of male readers who do read her. So, I mean, my husband, Dennis Duffy, does, and quite a lot of my male, I think maybe I have more male colleagues than female colleagues who are passionate Alice Munro readers and scholars, right?

So it's still a good question because her subject matter is, so much of it is sexuality. I mean, you could say, as Judy Stoffman said, that her subject is sex, not surrender of the woman to the man, but the surrender to the body. And I think that men can relate to that. Or maybe men relate to it because they see something.

I don't know. I wouldn't want to speak for them. But there's Almodovar, who made a film of the Juliet stories. I saw it and it seemed to me to have very little to do with the Juliet stories, but that's his Alice Munro. I mean, I could go on, there's so many men. So just because we're only women here doesn't mean there wouldn't have been men who could have come and spoken passionately about it. But this deserves talking about, especially in the historical context, where once upon a time there was such a small cluster in Canada. So we're still close enough to that to be grateful that now we have so many, right? But I don't know. It's not a question that's easy to answer.

Well, that's why we ask them. That's what we do here. One of those writers you're referring to is Heather O'Neill, who we just so happen to have on this program. She wrote the following in the Toronto Star last week. Sheldon, if you would, the graphic, please. Monroe's principal characters can never be tamed. She is sometimes regarded by those who don't actually engage with her work, as a writer who documents the sweetness of small-town life. For them, Monroe will always be about young ladies who behave nicely and drink tea comfortably at home.

But once you really dive into the world of Alice Monroe, you realize there is no such thing as a well-behaved young lady. Their heads and hearts are filled with a wickedness that should make you wary of drinking any tea they serve you. They are mercurial, unpredictable creatures that can never be known by anyone but themselves. So good. They're wicked, but they're also plotters, right? There's no nice young girls in any stories.

But many of them are plotting and plotting together. And in one story, they're plotting a murder, right? I mean, in one of the camp stories. So this is, yeah, you're totally right. It's nothing nice, nicety nice about that. Do you want to pick up on that, Heather? Yeah, exactly as you were saying. They plot because they want...

For an Alice Munro character, they refuse to believe that idea, like, who do you think you are? And they'll plot, and they do strange things. They're so peculiar because they need to have their own life stories. They need to get away. They have this desire for freedom, which comes with sexual desire a lot and

just knowing the desires of the body and the mind and the spirit and what i loved about that quote is that you touched on something that i feel a lot of people who are not deeply engaged with monroe stories might assume that they're simple pleasant tales about well-behaved women but in fact i find that they defy easy categorization. You know, they're complex, just like any young girl. We're all complex, right? I know I was complex when I was a teenager, so you couldn't categorize me as good or bad. And so that's what I really appreciate about that quote when I read it and your article, Heather. Well, this might explain, Catherine, why there were efforts, certainly when the books first came out, and I mean, I think they've dissipated now, but

there were efforts to ban these books when they first came out. Were they considered that subversive at the time? Well, I don't know. I wasn't aware that they were banned, but I was aware that they were opening a whole can of worms. that they were opening a whole can of worms. You know, they were new and groundbreaking for so many reasons, not just her herself, but what she was saying. And I think recently I've begun to realize

that Alice Munro had a very strong sense of herself. She was, you know, despite the problems with the mother and the limitations of the background and so on, she had absolutely no questions about who she was. And she was courageous. And I know over my writing career, as I've, you know, I wrote lots of short stories and began writing bigger, more research novels,

that you can move away from that courage and that ability to admit shame or things about oneself that are going to engage the reader. But am I going there? Or to enrage one's neighbors neighbors which she had the courage to do it's easy to lose your courage over a writing career and she never did right let's look at a clip here shall we this is alice monroe didn't just win the giller prize once she actually won it twice which is really something this is the guess, the finest literary prize for fiction in the country today. And, okay, here's from 1998, her accepting the prize. Sheldon, if you would.

This is a wonderful moment for me. And I think it's a great moment for those of us who can't kick the habit of writing short stories, for all of you who are in that position, as I am, I think this should be encouraging. Manika, do short story writers as opposed to novelists need special encouragement? You seem to think so. Well, I mean, the thing is, we know, I guess, that they're of equal weight, but there seems to be so much focus always on the novel.

I think that's more of a commercial thing, too, right? But something is so incredible about short stories, right? You get an entire world in 30, 40, 60 pages. You really have to distill. world in 30, 40, 60 pages. You really have to distill. You have to work hard to distill down what you're trying to say to that length of story. I mean, I think it's wonderful. I think some of us, you know, growing up, it was almost like short stories are practice. They're not practice for a novel. They're an art form in and of themselves, right? And there's something really, really difficult and really wonderful about them. Yeah, Chanel, I know it's I mean, Doug Gibson, I think, was so successful with her because he said, I'm never going to try to force you into becoming a novelist.

But but it's it's well, you tell me, is it harder to write a good short story than a good novel? Because it's harder to say a lot in fewer words. That's what I hear. You tell me. Well, for me, I haven't written a novel yet. I'm in the process of trying to write a novel, but I can't respond to, you know, it is hard to write a short story because you're trying to get, like, you know, my fellow panelists just said, you're trying to get an entire life and an entire story into a very limited word count. And that's not easy. And that requires discipline.

It requires, you know, being able to kill a lot of your babies to get it to that short story form. And it requires ensuring that every word and every line you write carries the story forward. And it takes, like I mentioned, it takes a lot of discipline to do that. And it's still something I'm perfecting. It's still something I'm working on. And I think it's a lifetime learning experience to write a short story because the more you write them, the more

you learn about the form. And I think Monroe just, she was the master. And I don't know how she did it because she wrote so many of them and they were all exquisite. And you left her stories knowing that these characters' lives continued because they were never nicely wrapped up like some short stories are. But at the same time you left satisfied, right? And I think that is the difference

between a novel and a short story for me is that satisfaction in so few word counts versus, you know versus a longer form. Heather, did she seem to you to be, I don't know, uncomfortable in the spotlight? Did she prefer being out of the spotlight? Oh, I have no idea. I really wanted to answer that short story question. Okay, fire away on that one then.

wanted to answer that short story question okay fire away on that one then i find that um for me a short story it is in a way harder even though it that seems counterintuitive because a short i always look at a short stories if you're packing for a trip and you just have this small suitcase so you can only put essentials in and everything has to be there has to be some reason for it so sometimes i write short stories but then i love and I feel so much easier when I'm in a novel because you can, it's like a novel is more like a giant trunk that you're packing to go across seas. And it's like you throw everything in, all your backstory. It's like you can go on three pages about the philosophy of cats and whatever. So it has that sort of, and I think Monroe, who fashioned her... And maybe it has to do with her sort of the way

she kind of was humble and wanted to stay away from the public was because she lived in... When she started writing, she had so many children and she wasn't able to publish until her late 30s. So she always said that writing short stories was the only way she could because she did it in snatches of moments. So those snatches of moments were so precious for her that she was able to have these really exquisite, as Chanel described them, stories. Can I follow up with you on that? Because I think this is fair to say, men don't get mad at me,

but women assume a disproportionate burden when it comes to the home life. And certainly a woman of her generation would have found that to be the case. How did she, you know, be a wife, be a mother, and still manage to figure out how to write all of this greatness? By writing short stories. you know, be a wife, be a mother, and still managed to figure out how to write all of this greatness. By writing short stories. Yeah, I still think that even now, I think also is an economic thing.

You need more money if you're going to set aside time to write a novel. Every, I see Heather nodding. You know, you can't just sit down and write and decide to write a novel, but you can try to write a short story. So that economic factor is still there. And I think what happened with Monroe is that she, what was she say? She did it between the ironing. I mean, and she did it literally in the laundry room, right? And even in Clinton,

she was working not, she liked to be, and I know because she gave me her telephone number, she, I don't know how she worked with people interrupting her by phoning her. I mean, she didn't tell me when I could and couldn't phone her, so I just never did. I mean, it would really take something for me to phone her. But I think maybe something about her being willing to be interrupted and to be writing. She had that short story in her head.

She was always telling stories in her head. And she had that story in her head, and she was crafting it. But she's a storyteller. She's not a short story writer like Joyce or whatever, where you come to an epiphany. She captures the process of telling, the storytelling process, which we all do. It's an egalitarian thing. We all do it. But at the same time, she would have this very crafted thing, right? I mean, how did she do that? And I think her stories are actually closer to poetry than they are to novels because of how carefully they're like the Japanese floating worlds.

You know, the white space is in between and you can read them. And she's focused so strongly on images. She's often said how she writes from a particular image. And the characters, specifically one character, she's our Charlie Chaplin, right? All those women characters are clowns. And as she once said, she leapfrogs over herself all the time. They're none of them her, right? But the stories are there, and they go in and out of the consciousness of whatever the woman is, whether it's Juliet or Rose or whatever. And they float. They float.

You don't feel trapped in her stories. And so that's why when they're over, you can start reading them again, or you can go and tell your own story. It feels like you're participating in them all the time, so they don't feel limiting at all. I'm not sure you could... People say she's our Chekhov. The person who said that must have been more familiar with checkoff than i than i am i think she's more maybe like uh our wordsworth or as i've said our charlie chaplin or something because you know i when i when i had lunch with her she took me out for lunch to celebrate

mothers and other clowns she offered to take me out. She came to Toronto and said, could I meet her at Tall Poppy's, which was a restaurant across from the Art Gallery of Ontario. Are you old enough to remember that? It was a very nice restaurant. And when I arrived there, she told me that she had arrived there the previous week because she'd got the date wrong. Anyhow, we had this was, as you can imagine, I was very nervous meeting her for the first time. Anyhow, we had this was, as you can imagine, I was very nervous meeting her for the first time. And she kept saying over and over again how she was so glad that this was back in 19, what was it, 1992? You're supposed to help me with the dates. But anyway, when my book came out and she said over and over again how glad she was that I had treated her as a comic writer.

And she said, I'm so sick of being treated as a grim realist. Except she did that in a Huron County accent. And so I said, well, Alice, do you think of yourself as a clown then? And she said, always, Maggie, always. So, I mean, that's better understood now. I think it was James Wood who said that when he reviewed Too Much Happiness, he said there are seeds of laughter sprinkled through in between the lines of every story. And I think that's true of all her stories. There's this, depending on how you

respond, how your own intimate connection with her is working, you will find yourself laughing. But the potentiality is always there. And for weeping, I just recently read a story called Fiction, which I concluded must be about infant deaths because of an allusion to Kinder Totenlieder. That's just kind of like I went berserk with it. Before I knew it, I was like weeping buckets. And it's not meant to be, you know, like a tragic story. Okay, let's go around on this final question here.

How do you think readers and writers are going to remember Alice Munro? Chanel, start us off. I think because her books transcend time, and I think they transcend generations. And I've been rereading and rereading her stories almost once every other month. I think just because there's so much that you can get from her stories with every reading, readers. Readers will find themselves going back to Alice Munro stories over and over again, no matter what age they are. I think Heather mentioned reading her when she was younger and now reading her as she's a bit older. It's the same thing with me. I'm going to be reading her until I'm 100 years old. Hopefully I live to be that old. But yeah, I think just daily reading. Heather, how about to you?

But yeah, I think just dying to be me. Heather, how about to you? Oh, yeah. As Maggie was saying before, that there's so many things we still have to talk about Alice Munro because her humor and sexuality, which are two things women are not supposed to have. And Alice Munro had them, you know, in just such a wonderful enormity.

And I think she will be recognized all over the world, everywhere I travel, whenever I mention that I'm from Canada, one of the first things I hear is that, oh, you're from Alice Munro's country. So she's just, she's out there and she's synonymous and she helps all Canadian writers find a platform and ways to be recognized on the world stage. Meenika? You know, when I was in Wingham for the Alice Minerva Festival of the Short Story,

it was in, this is where Alice is from. And in the downtown strip, there's all these little shops like you would expect in a Southern Ontario small town. But for the festival, everyone had put papers on the windows with their favorite quotes or different quotes from the books.

And walking down the street was just such a magical experience because you just got little snippets of all of these quotes from the books. And walking down the street was just such a magical experience because you just got little snippets of all of these lives from the books. And I think that's how people remember her. Like there's something that spoke to them from a story and they hold on to those little nuggets. And yeah, that's what I think of. Tessa.

I think that Alice Munro belongs to the world now, but we have to remember as Canadians that we grew Alice Munro belongs to the world now, but we have to remember as Canadians that we grew Alice Munro. You know, Canadian money paid for those first short stories that were broadcast on CBC Anthology and even in magazines like Chatelaine. There was a broad Canadian public that bought into this kind of naissance feeling of this is what we're like right inside our country. This is what we do

privately at our dinner tables and in our family and so on. And I think that we need to keep that sense as we become global and all the rest, but that sense that there is something really a core Canadian essence in these stories. Last word to Maggie Redikop. Yes, I'm going to be reading her, rereading her. She'll be remembered because she will be reread. Not everybody invites rereading, but Alice Munro does. Every time you read her, you see more. Because you see different things, because you are different. And I think that with that, people will remember her incredible compassion.

She's like a Beckett or a Shakespeare. She's not like one of those writers who's got their sharpness there, but it's her, every character, those nasty little girls, you know, the plot, that murder another girl, there's, it's Shakespearean. She's got an understanding of every character she writes about. She lets herself into those characters. It's the breadth and the depth of that. No, but she'll be remembered as, I like Miriam Taves' comment in, she visited Alice, you know, when Alice was already in, moving into dementia. And she said that Alice was pretending to write basically, but sitting, honoring her writing desk, right? Always there. She endured to the end, writing stories and telling stories for us.

And I think we just love her so much. Beautiful. And we will miss her. Mr. Director, can I have a shot of everybody, please? As I thank Chanel Sutherland, Heather O'Neill, Catherine Gauvier, Maynika Raman-Williams, and Magdalene Redikop for being on TVO tonight. Thanks so much, everybody. Thank you. Thank you., everybody. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. The Agenda with Steve Paikin is made possible through generous philanthropic contributions

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