May 2024: Loving Alice Munro 🌷

Remembering the great short story writer. Plus, will you join us in June at the Jersey Shore?

Dear Writers,

If you pay attention to the life and death of short story writers, you probably know that Alice Munro passed away last week at age 92. I love reading and teaching Munro. Coincidentally, I taught her story, The Bear Came Over the Mountain last week, so was immersed in loving her all over again when she died.

I never studied Munro in college or grad school and came to her in the 1990’s (I think), at the suggestion of a close friend who loved her. Many of Munro’s best stories are available online and I began teaching two or three of her stories a year.

There is so much to love and relate to with Munro: She was a divorced mother of three daughters, a bookstore owner who had issues with her own mother (Dear Life), a writer living in a small town who wrote about life as she knew, imagined and feared it. No subject was off limits: Adultery and dementia (The Bear Came Over the Mountain), the death of a child (Gravel and Miles, City Montana), deformity (Face), a homicidal father convicted of filicide (Dimension), the loss of a spouse (Free Radicals), a life improved by a car accident and terminated engagement (Passion), turkey gutting (The Turkey Season), the life and loves of a librarian (Carried Away), the adventures of a mother who becomes estranged from her daughter (Chance, Soon and Silence), a trilogy that became the movie, Julieta, directed by Pedro Almodóvar.

The Bear Came Over the Mountain was made into the movie Away From Her, directed by Sarah Polley and starring Julie Christie. Christie plays Fiona, a beautiful, 70something wife who has dementia, and falls in love with (or seems to) another man, after Grant, her once-philandering husband, places her at an assisted living facility. Grant is far more lovable in the movie than he is in the story, and it is instructive and fun to read the story and then watch this fabulous, surprising movie.

Munro had the uncanny ability to make you care about characters that you might have avoided “in real life.” Most of her characters lived in small towns in Canada. Terrible and sometimes magical things happened to them. No matter what, their great and small dramas were dramatized and deepened as Munro narrated them. Most of Munro’s stories are lengthy character portraits of people who make questionable choices. They get into trouble, cheat, lie, and die; they feel betrayed, abandoned and misunderstood. They repress their true feelings, love in small, measured ways and resign themselves to the consequences. In almost every story, there is a twist, a turn, a pivot. Characters change, in ways they didn’t expect. No matter what happens, you care deeply about the characters, understand their points of view, and wonder what happens to them next.

A few years ago, I typed out the work of three writers I loved: Two essays from Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen, all of Munro’s story Corrie and half of Ann Patchett’s novel, Commonwealth. I read somewhere that typing out the work of a writer you admired could help you understand how they generated tension, wove in details, structured the story. I found that this was true, you actually could begin to absorb another writer’s technique through your fingertips and pass it along to your brain. As I was typing out Corrie, a funny, surprising story about a wealthy woman who has an affair with an architect (the woman is described as “a middle aged mistress with a dragging foot”), I felt ecstatic: Look at what is happening here, and whoah! What is happening there? And look how that sentence landed and why that detail mattered! And what a twist! It was a thrill, typing out the words of Alice Munro and seeing what they yielded.

She had told him that she was not a virgin. But that turned out to be a complicated half-truth, owing to the interference of a piano teacher, when she was fifteen. She had gone along with what the piano teacher wanted because she felt sorry for people who wanted things so badly.

“Don’t take that as an insult,” she said, explaining that she had not continued to feel sorry for people in that way.

“I should hope not,” he said.

- Alice Munro, Corrie

We’re launching a bimonthly, online book club. We will discuss how a book is structured and why it works. We’ll meet via Zoom on three Thursday nights, from 6-7 p.m, on June 13, August 1 and October 3. The discussions will be recorded so if you miss one, we will send it to you. We’ll read Nathan Hill’s novel Wellness for June 13 and Leslie Jamison’s memoir Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story for August 1. Our third book is TBD. If there are books you want to discuss and unpack, tell us!

I love helping writers get published. In the past few months, these Sweet Lab writers have published their work: Hilda Chazanovitz, Bringing Passover Back to the Town Where the Nazis Killed Our Relatives (The Forward), Lisa S. Greene, Where’s My Knife (Eat, Darling, Eat); Jennifer Door-Moon, Nice Stuff (Herstry); Kate Levin, Life Lessons (Marathon Lit); Elissa Caterfino Mandel, Our Passover: Why this night is different from all others (The Forward), Leslie Dannin Rosenthal, Entertaining Fish (Eat, Darling, Eat). Zelly Ruskin’s first novel, Not Yours to Keep, will be published by She Writes Press and distributed by Simon & Schuster, in October. Other Sweet Lab writers have work coming out in Eat, Darling, Eat and Kveller.

If you want to get your essay/short story/memoir/novel published, come write with us during our Jersey Shore writing retreat in June. Registration deadline: May 28. You can also pay directly via Venmo or Zelle.

About: Join us for a 3.5 day, 3-night writing retreat, Monday, June 24 through Thursday morning, June 27. Mornings, we’ll meet for 3-hour workshops, then have lunch, dinner and ice cream together. Afternoons will be spent at your leisure, writing, sunbathing, paddle-boarding, kayaking, bike riding, getting massages, and walking the jetties in Barnegat Light. Writers can submit up to 40 pages (10,000 words) for line edits, feedback & discussion. Submissions due June 10. Writers can stay at Daddy O’s in Brant Beach or any hotel of their choosing.

Cost: $1,800, includes three writing workshops, one half-hour conference with Laura, three lunches, three dinners and beach and bay access.

Exclusions: Hotel room, alcohol, massages, and rental bikes.

Booking: We have a block of standard queen rooms at Daddy O’s, priced at $425/night. Please book your room using the code ZINFRO. Daddy O’s is a fun place to stay and offers free “grab n go” breakfast. Of course, you can stay anywhere you want. Other options include Sandcastle in Barnegat Light, and Hotel LBI and Drifting Sands in Ship Bottom.

Alice Munro on writing about life, love, sex and secrets (Podcast with Eleanor Wachtel)

Jonny Diamond, My Mother Will Live Forever in the Stories of Alice Munro (Lit Hub)

Sheila Munro, Lives of Mothers & Daughters: Growing Up With Alice Munro

Deborah Treisman, Alice Munro Invigorated the Short Story; On Editing Alice Munro; On “Dear Life”: An Interview with Alice Munro (The New Yorker)

James Wood, Alice Munro, Our Chekhov (The New Yorker)

25 Alice Munro Short Stories You Can Read Online Right Now (Lit Hub)

Best Alice Munro Books (NYT)

You can read more Alice Munro stories here.