Judith Maclean Miller

An Inner Bell that Rings: the Craft of Alice Munro

 Freeman Patterson: The rapidly changing
 surface makes every image significantly
 different from all the others, and each
 contains an element of chance, because
 I cannot press the shutter release
 quickly enough to capture exactly what
 I've seen before it changes.
 (Portraits of Earth 90)

Patterson's statement has a lively life in my own mind. Too true. I have been reading interviews with Alice Munro-and her own statements on writing. I have also been working in my garden and browsing in my dictionary. "Craft" is an ancient word in the English language, closely connected to an Old Norse word meaning "strength." So I have been thinking about the strength of Alice Munro, about her ways of working, and about gardens. Images from all of it keep flickering and connecting in my Mind. I have been feeling the need for a particularly quick shutter release.

Munro taught me to understand something of how the oblique, complicated language of southern Ontario works. When the aunts suggest to Del, in Lives of Girls and Women, that it must be nice that her mother has time to run around the countryside selling encyclopedias, I now know that they mean something altogether other than what they seem to be saying. Like Del, I knew that this way of speaking was powerful and dangerous. I did not know much about how it worked until Munro showed me. I will always be grateful.

It has been less clear to me that Munro has influenced me in lots of other ways as well. She describes her stories as houses, with places to wander in and out and around in. I was startled to recognize that I have constructed my garden that way. Lots of entry points. No single way of moving in it. No single viewing point. Above all, it is not constructed to sit back and look at. It is an invitation to participate, to move around in-in non-linear ways. I have been surprised to learn that I also write essays that way: lots of open spaces. Lots of recurring motifs, colours, to enjoy separately, injuxtaposition to one another, or as a whole: essai: a process, I have come to understand, instead of a practice. Munro has also fought a battle for femininity, for a direct and personal voice which does not have to take on some fashionable accent or other. It is what it is, grounded in her experience and observation. Delightful. Freeing. And it follows the directions of her interests.

It vastly amuses me to discover that reading Munro stories over the years has affected the way I have approached making a garden, and in turn has given me greater appreciation than I might otherwise have had for Munro's reflections on her writing. It also greatly pleases me to understand that Munro has had the courage to insist on her own processes, her forms, her designs. I would not have expected one of the positionings of a reader to be outside, in the garden, with a shovel. These stories do indeed go on working beyond the space/time of the reading act which turns their pages-in whatever sequence.

 Mallow. Deeply cut, dark
 leaves, intricate and private, have
 sprung up around a birdbath. Their
 blossom will be violet or white,
 where buds are settling now among
 the leaves.  I brought them here from
 a dusty ditch by the roadside, just
 outside of Elora, where they were
 wilting in the heat. Here they grow
 rich and plump. Malvaceous.

For a while, I puzzled about issues of readership in relation to these interviews with Munro. Author-Text-Reader? Who is author? Munro? The interviewer? The transcriber who listened painstakingly to a taped interview, trying to catch "the grain of the voice," and to reproduce it faithfully? Probably editing some as she went? What is the text? Transcribed orality: with all the rhythms of the spoken language, as opposed to the inscribed. Certainly, it is text: texture: weaving: of many strands, all put together for a reading pleasure. What is that pleasure? How am I positioned as reader? Eavesdropper? Privileged? Ignored? Addressed in some indirect way? Some other time I will think more about all that. This time, I wanted to know what Munro had to say about writing.

I have focused on three conversations-with Hancock, Rasporich, and Metcalf-with occasional digressions into other Munro statements about writing. For another time, there are lots of other conversations to consider. I was also-briefly-intrigued by the ways in which the speech of the questioner is always neat and tidy on the page: clear, direct, coherent. Munro's answers are full of open spaces: sets of dots to mark ellipses (of what? words left out? her breathing? her thinking?), occasional "um" as she pauses to choose a word, repetitions of words or corrections of them. The presentation on the page suggests a power relationship. The interviewer always speaks first, in clear ordered prose-and then Munro does her best to answer, reaching for words to express the deep processes of her writing. Somehow, through it all, Munro prevails.

With a gift certificate, I recently treated myself to Freeman Patterson's Portraits of earth. For some time, there did not seem to be any connections between my browsing in Munro interviews, working in my garden, reading in the dictionary, and looking into Patterson's book. I was simply enjoying the images and patterns from each, until a central irritation became a place around which they all began to gather. That centre presented itself in the following exchange between Alice Munro and Geoff Hancock. The passage kept repeating in my mind, over and over, until I finally turned to look straight at it.

 Hancock: So, you don't feel completely
 secure in your style.  You are still
 working towards that.
 Munro: No. That's not it.  I don't want
 to work towards a style.  I want to go
 with the story the way it has to be.  I
 do feel a kind of inner bell that rings
 when something is okay.  I'm never sure
 it's as it should be but I have a
 certain amount of confidence.  It has
 never occurred to me to work towards a
 style.  I don't think I have a style. 
 I don't recognize a style.  I would
 probably call it something else.  I
 would call it a way of telling a story.
 Or something like that.  There I like
 to be fairly flexible.
 (Hancock, 1982 108)

Hancock's statement at first startled, even annoyed me. It seemed a condescending thing to say to a writer who had won two Governor General's awards for fiction and who had published several impressive and successful books. How dare he, I thought. But then I noticed that his comment had brought a quick and direct answer from Munro-and that both his implied question and her answer have lingered with me. As an "interviewing question," it worked well. I also acknowledge that he was voicing what a good many people thought then-and often still think. As Munro herself says, in the same interview, people are always asking her about the next book, and they all want to hear that the next one is a novel. Many of her readers assume she is working toward somewhere. Why, I wondered. And I began to think that it has something to do with what she says about her ways of working with a story. She herself says that she is often not sure that the story is done. And it often is not finished. She takes it a certain distance and then it goes on developing in the mind of the reader. What she doe§ is uncannily effective. Is it style? Maybe. In the very widest sense of that word. It is not, as she suspected Hancock to mean, formula. She insists on working from the inside of the story, following where it leads. Instead of imposing a style or pattern onto material, she works at finding "A way of telling a story." Process instead of practice.

What Munro has to say about her ways of telling a story is endlessly interesting to me. I notice as I read interviews with her, that I tend to skip over the bits about her attitudes to men and women, whether or not she is a feminist. Those passages are often marked in the library books orjoumals I have been readi ng. I just do not seem to care as much about those topics. I am intrigued that she has told us over and over again how she works, but we seem not to believe her-or at least not to understand what she means. So we keep asking her.

 Munro: What I want to get changes with
 different stories.  It's got to be
 dictated by the material itself.  And
 sometimes I want to get something that
 is very grainy and I don't want any
 artifice at all.  I don't want the
 choice of words to seem anywhere
 elegant.  I want awkwardness.  I want
 to get a kind of plainness.  And then
 I would be doing another story with
 different material and I want it to be,
 I feel that it should be, well, lush
 isn't the word I mean.  But there
 should be a kind of luxuriance.  The
 feeling of the story should be of lots
 and lots of words and resonance. 
 Things level upon level.  And this
 means the writing has to change
 completely. (Hancock 107)

As I read this conversation, I realize that my pleasure in this text is not passive or dispassionately analytic but a delight in a deep recognition which goes all the way into muscles and joints and bones which still ache from last summer's clearing away of underbrush and dead wood, to make a garden. Is this part of what reading/writing with the body means? Style, she is telling me, is not a fixed and static thing. Style grows out of the task. Intellectual awareness, analysis, which I confess I delight in, is not all there is. Writing, reading, gardening are processes which discover their own logic, their own positioning, their own aesthetic, in response to what is called for: grainy or elegant; plain or lush.

 Munro: Well, I read a bit in your
 interview with John (Metcalf). He knew
 why he was using words. He did. I was
 terribly impressed. That's like knowing
 carpentry or something. And I am really
 impressed by skills. Yes. And I thought,
 if I had written that, I wouldn't be
 able to explain why I used any of those
 words. I would have laboured over them.
 It wouldn't have come out in any divine
 flood of inspiration. (Hancock 87)

The labour, for Munro, is not to theorize about why she chooses specific words, but as she says, to find the right resonance, the sound, the fit. Perhaps it is difficult for academics to accept an explanation like that. We have such an ingrained habit of watching with one hand whatever it is that the other hand (or brain) is doing. There is nothing naive about the labour Munro is describing. Much of it is based in waiting-and in trust. It is sophisticated, difficult, disciplined work.

Munro tells Hancock about overhearing a conversation in China where one of the Canadian men explained to their hosts that in Canada we have "serious writers and popular writers. Alice is a popular writer" (Hancock 86). She was upset by that comment because she considers herself a serious writer. Is a person to be considered a serious writer only if no one wants to read his books-or if he is theoretical and analytical about his work? Munro is suspicious about such analysis: "I do spend a lot of my time engaged at whatever this process is. If I'm called upon to back off and describe it, not only do I do it badly but it doesn't help the process at all" (Hancock 76).

Yes. I could never have described to anyone what I was doing in the yard last year. I was making my way toward garden. I laboured over the placing of plants-there was no flood of inspiration, but there was a trust that it would all work out. If I placed plants respectfully and carefully, they would be in the right place: after I had moved them several times-and as I continue to move them. Munro says she constantly edits and changes a story-even after the story is published. During a reading, she says, she will change what is on the page, because now she knows how "to do it better."

Munro tells Beverly Rasporich:

 But, you know I don't get into
 theoretical arguments because most
 of them seem ridiculous.
 [Rasporich:] Why?
 [Munro:] Because most arguments that
 pretend to be about, you know,
 intellectual topics, seem actually  sort
 of simple ego struggles, simple
 one-upmanship. And I suppose I know
 that I'm not good at  that, but I also
 don't see any need to do it. And I think
 many women are reacting this way so that
 in a way we castigate ourselves for
 not being assertive enough but we may
 just be unwilling to waste the time. 
 (Rasporich 16)

Refusing tu waste time in this sort of debate/discussion does not mean inferiority. Even if some male academics want to dismiss Munro as "a housewife writer" (Rasporich 3). As Rasporich asserts, " . . she is neither the naive intellectual nor casual artist she sometimes pretends to be. She is an extremely sophisticated, literate and literary woman, an obsessively dedicated writer who has served a long apprenticeship, writing continuously since she was fourteen years old, a woman with an exacting mind when it comes to a discussion of her work and the literary process, and however careful she is of others' feelings, quietly does not suffer either imprecise thinkers or pretentious people gladly" (Rasporich 3).

I know what Rasporich means, but I really do not think, having looked at many interviews, that Munro ever pretends to be a "nayve intellectual" or a "casual artist." That is a persona which has been constructed for her in some circles and she takes a wicked kind of glee in participating in it, parodying it, mimicking it. But only so far. She always defends the work and its way of happening. She never compromises the integrity of her artistry. Rasporich is absolutely right about the sophistication: a sophistication which insists on process rather than practice, a process which is never static, which constantly renews itself, which keeps Munro alive and growing as a writer and makes her difficult to label or pin into a place on a board, described as a particular kind of writer, with a certain style. Something about it all makes me want to laugh. Munro constantly repositions her reader, within a story and certainly from story to story, from book to book. I did not expect to be re-positioned all the way out to the garden and a lot of hard work-but I am glad it happened.

As I read these interviews, parallel texts happen in my mind: passages from the fiction, a subtext of Freeman Patterson's comments and a surprising, unexpected, intertext of my own garden, with, I suspect, a kind of ghosttext of my reading in "high theory."

"Her solution to the problem of artist-as-female was quite naturally and bravely to become the female-as-artist, and as an interpreter and puzzling critic of the roles of women and codes of sexual conduct she knew and witnessed, a quiet revolutionary" (Rasporich I 1). Rasporich appreciates Munro's celebration of "the feminine." Yes. Many women have striven for Virginia Woolf's ideal of the "incandescent mind," the mind free of all emotion, distraction and connection with the trials/insights of femininity or womanliness, of daily life. Woolf's advocacy of androgyny became, in some instances, a kind of castration, which insisted on an objectivity or distancing that was almost impossible to maintain. And which we have learned to distrust. Indeed, Woolf herself could not sustain it. Munro has been a vital part of our leaming to accept our humanity, to work from where we find ourselves, as careful craftspeople who engage in the whole process from the inside out.

 Twigg: You're suspicious of
 spontaneity?
 Munro: I suppose so. I'm not afraid
 spontaneity would betray me
 because I've done some fairly
 self-exposing things.  But I'm afraid
 it would be repetitious and boring if
 I wrote that way. It's as if I must
 take great care over everything. 
 Instead of splashing the colours out
 and trusting they will all come
 together, I have to know the design.
 (Twigg 16)

Sigh. My friend is a wonderful gardener. She can grow all kinds of things. But she splashes the colour all around with no semblance of design. Some days, it hurts me to look at it. I am not anything like as good a gardener. Things don't grow or don't bloom as I expect them to, or as hers do, but I make my garden. I design it. I want a certain kind of atmosphere, a certain kind of space, and I do my best to create it. Over and over again. I move things around, I add new things. I give away plants. It is never done. I never get it right. But I keep working at it, Within an overall design or feeling that I want. Which has nothing to do with graph paper and planning it all out ahead of time on a piece of paper.Which a garden magazine recommendsand which idea horrifies me. I walk in it, I sit in it, I stare at it, and I keep working at it.

 Munro: So when I write a story I want
 to make a certain kind of structure,
 and I know the feeling I want to get
 from being inside that structure. 
 This is the hard part of the
 explanation, where I have to use a
 word like "feeling," which is not
 very precise, because if I attempt
 to be more intellectually respectable
 I will have to be dishonest.  "Feeling"
 will have to do. There is no blueprint
 for the structure. It's not a question
 of, "I'll make this kind of house
 because if I do it right it will have
 this effect." I've got to make, I've
 got to build up, a house, a story,
 to fit around the indescribable
 "feeling" that is like the soul of the
 story, and which I must insist upon in a
 dogged, embarrassed way, as being no
 more definable than that.  And I don't
 know where it comes from.  It seems to
 be already there and some unlikely clue,
 such as a shop window or a bit of
 conversation, makes me aware of it. 
 Then I start accumulating the
 material and putting it together. Some
 of the material I may have lying around
 already, in memories and observations,
 and some I invent, and some I have to
 go diligently looking for
 (factual details), while some is dumped
 in my lap (anecdotes, bits of speech).
 I see how this material might go
 together to make the shape I need,
 and I try it. I keep trying and seeing
 where I went wrong and trying again.
 (Munro, "What Is Real?" 224)

I understand that process. I know what she is describing. It has nothing to do with style or theory and everything to do with the look and feel of the structure emerging, as it is faithful to that sense of the "soul" of the undertaking. Sometimes, a glimpse of it comes clear and then it can be worked toward. At least for a while. But then it may rain-and the whole process has to start all over again. Or the slugs may get it. Or it may collapse from lack of sun or from its own weight. But there are times when it works. Wonderfully.

 Munro: I don't mean that I don't learn
 form and style. I just don't know how
 to talk about it. I probably absorb it.
 I learn all the time from just about
 everybody I choose to read now. Because
 a lot of things I don't read any more.
 You know, I used to read everything I
 thought I was supposed to read. I think
 a writer is probably learning from
 everything they read from the age of
 fifteen on. (Hancock 92)

Munro ends her article, "What is Real," with a clear statement: "No, I am not concerned with using what is real to make any sort of record or prove any sort of point, and I am not concerned with any methods of selection but my own, which I can't fully explain. This is quite presumptuous, and if writers are not allowed to be so-and quite often, in many places, they are not-I see no point in the writing of fiction (Munro 226). Testy. And true. And brave. Good for her, I think. And, I also think, one of the reasons it is so hard to explain is that we are used to "explanatory" language which takes a point of observation outside a finished product, rather than inside a process-"and we don't really try to explain because it is too difficult"

(Munro 223). Fiction, I remind myself occasionally, comes from a Latin word meaning "to affange." Which is exactly what Munro says she does: she observes, she selects, she arranges, she creates, and then she arranges again. Does that mean that my garden is a fiction? It may well be. In more ways than one.

 Munro: Other stories arejust
 completely a feeling, as I've said.
 I want the characters and what happens
 subordinated to a climate?
 Hancock: How do you create that climate?
 Munro: That's what the whole story is
 trying to do.  You don't do it by
 passages of descriptive writing or
 anything like that. It's the writer's
 angle of vision that will
 do it. (Hancock 82)

 Patterson: Depending on our mobility and
 our range of lenses, anything is
 possible. (91)

And Munro well knows that an angle of vision may be odd, peculiar, sometimes even dangerous:

 ... the other problem I feel that is
 related to the woman's life as a woman
 and her life as an artist is that
 writing is dangerous to the psyche. 
 It's unbalanced.  It's like a trip you
 take alone, all serious writing is
 like this.  Now this is something we
 are accustomed to thinking of the male
 artist as doing. It may not be very nice
 for his wife and kids but it is important
 that he do it. And we have a picture of
 woman which is very strong in our minds
 as being the person who doesn't go on
 journeys, the person who is there
 looking after the material wants but
 also providing a kind of unquestioning
 cushion. (Rasporich 21)

 Patterson: My most familiar waterscape
 is my bathtub. When it is filled to
 the usual level, my knees protrude
 through the water surface like two
 large triangular rocks, and an old
 brown bathsponge drifts like a mass of
 floating seaweed, while I observe
 everything from a position halfway up
 the island of my head.  From here I
 gaze across a seemingly enormous
 expanse of water, watching as the
 visible dynamic of its surface changes
 with my activity, from placid to
 gently rippled, rough and textured or
 turbulent.  Waves move in whatever
 direction I choose, whipping up foam
 that swirls around the islands to
 faraway coasts.  Reflections vary with
 the calmness of the surface, the amount
 of light streaming through the window,
 and the nearby arrangement of bath
 towels, which occasionally appear as
 the warm rays of a sunrise or sunset on
 a glassy sea. (Patterson 91)

Patterson goes on to say that when he leaves his bath tub, he goes into the light and shadow of the St. John River close to his home, his second most fan-tiliar waterscape, or he wanders the world, finding such scapes in many widely differing settings. But they all come back,in some way, to that time in the bathtub. He works from the inside out, widening into an ever expanding world. He takes the physical voyages and also the other ones which Munro refers to. And he knows about creating "climate:"

 If we use the lens we already have on
 the camera and move a little closer
 to important foreground objects,
 perhaps some flowers, we can enlarge
 them enormously without noticeably
 increasing the size of the
 background-perhaps some hills-thus
 changing their relative size in the
 picture space and increasing the
 impression of distance between them.
 (Patterson 46)

A photographer discussing his craft. He makes decisions about composition, about what is given significance. And he often does that by concentrating on the foreground, understanding what he is doing, how it works. And each picture is different. He learns methods, but he then uses them. He does not simply repeat them. He approaches each photograph as a new project. Why is it so hard to believe that of Munro? Why would we assume that she is "working toward a style?"

Patterson describes his way of staring at a scene until he begins to "see" it, by which he means moving beyond a careless viewing, beginning to feel his way into the various elements which make up a situation which has caught his interest. What is there-and how can it best be shown? Not to duplicate it, but to demonstrate what is intrinsic to it, what is interesting. "Important foreground objects-" the things we fail to see as we contemplate the faraway hills. Patterson, like Munro, brings the focus in sharply to the foreground. And the paradox, of course, is that by doing so, they widen the sense of distance, they open up vistas to move in which we never imagined.

 Hancock: Do you try to make a scene
 like a photographer might?
 Munro: Well, I see the scene. I see it
 awfully clearly. And I want the reader
 to see it the way I see it. There's a
 story in the new book called
 "Visitors," where there's an important
 scene for me. It's at the beginning of
 the story. It's where two women are
 sitting out in the shade of a driveway
 on little camp chairs, crocheting
 tablecloths on a hot summer afternoon.
 The story is around that scene and I
 want that scene there so strongly.
 But I don't do much with it. I just
 say that they were sitting out
 crocheting tablecloths. That's all. So,
 I don't know how a reader's going to
 see that.  Maybe I've buried it. I
 would feel it was wrong for that story
 to tell any more detail about that
 scene.  It's got to be just like that.
 (Hancock 107-108)

That angle of vision shifts with each story. Which is, of course, part of the reason why the "style" has to shift or change with each piece. These stories are not, as Munro has told us, about reconstructing reality. They are about conveying that angle which gives us vision, truth, insight, but not necessarily reality as we think we know it. No wonder Munro gets testy or irritated. It's hard to be asked over and over again to explain what she's doing. Why can't we get it? Why can't we see it? Or is it more that we just thoroughly enjoy hearing her talk? That we like to listen to her reach for the explanation of what she does and how she does it? Perhaps we simply enjoy hearing a writer talk about her craft.

I have always liked the description of the Photographer which Del was working out in Lives of Girls and Women to include in the novel she was writing about Jubilee. It has always seemed to me exactly a description of the artist and of the ways an artist looks at the world-or at least the way Del looks at the world, and I confess, the way I think Munro does. Probably because this book seems to me not so much bildungsroman as kunstlerroman, the novel about the development of the artist-as-a-young-woman:

 One day a man came to take photographs
 at the high school.  She saw him first
 shrouded in his photographer's black
 cloth, a hump of grayblack, shabby
 cloth behind the tripod, the big eye,
 the black accordion pleating of the
 old-fashioned camera.  When he came
 out, what did he look like?  Black
 hair parted in the middle, combed back
 in two wings, dandruff, rather narrow
 chest and shoulders, and a pasty,
 flaky skin-and in spite of his look of
 scruffiness and ill health, a wicked
 fluid energy about him, a bright
 unpitying smile. (LGW 205)

Munro knows what she is talking about when she describes the dangers of the artist'sjourney. She has decided not to be eccentric, not to drive around the countryside in "a high square car whose top was of flapping black cloth" (LGW 205), probably because, as she says, the price would be too high.

 Metcalf: Does it frighten you that many
 successful women writers have led very
 a-typical lives?
 Munro: Yes. It does frighten me because
 I'm a fairly securitydemanding person. 
 I don't think I'm in any danger of ever
 leading a bizarre life. I tend to be a
 person of rather dull habits just
 because I want to work so much. I don't
 endanger this by having an exciting 
 life. (Metcalf 59)

We might understand her ways of working better, though. Sometimes I think part of the trouble people have reading Munro's work is that she seems so normal. She does not prepare observers for the kind of angle of vision whic.h might seem more appropriate to this eccentric photographer. People were afraid of him and they did not like his work. But they went to him because he was inexpensive. And then wondered what to do with a photograph where someone's eyes were white. And then DeUMunro's wry voice: "I had not worked out all the implications of this myself, but felt they were varied and powerful" (205). As, indeed, they are.

 Metcalf: How far is your work
 autobiographical?
 Munro: Oh. Well.  I guess I have a
 standard answer to this ... in 
 incident-no ... in emotion-completely.
 In incident up to a point too but of
 course, in Lives of Girls and Women
 which is a ... I suppose it could be
 called an autobiographical novel
 ... most of the incidents are changed
 versions of real incidents. Some are
 completely invented but the emotional
 reality, the girl's feeling forher
 mother, for men, for life is all
 ... it's all solidly autobiographical.
 I would not disclaim this at all. 
(Metcalf 58)

Munro is right to be suspicious about "style." Mavis Gallant decides it is the part of writing which writers themselves know least about. The word contains its own warnings within itself: it developed out of the Greek word for column or pedestal. And then it got tangled around the Latin word stylus, for a kind of pen, so that it came to be linked to what writers do. No one is more suspicious of pedestals than Munro. She knows how they sap the energy which needs to go into the work itself.

Themes and images repeat in my garden because they need to, because there is a space where something needs to be put. And the something suggests itself. It is not put there for reasons of some style or other, but because it balances something else-or it repeats something which needs repeating. Or I want it there. I have worked hard to make this garden a place to enter into, from any number of entry points, to move about in, in different directions, with wild places, where a hop toad lives and maybe other things.

Sometimes people construct gardens to look at from a particular-singlevantage point. In this garden even the robin takes up the invitation to follow the stepping stones. Sometimes in one direction, sometimes in another. Pausing here and there to absorb climate or atmosphere or to pick up a worm. The dog and cat know how to do it too. The cat sits and sniiles on a stepping stone, soaking up sun. The dog follows my latest way of walking the stones. None of them would ever expect to encounter the garden the same way twice. Even the stones themselves are moveable.

Reading in the ways Munro invites us to do is not easy to learn. Linearity has served us well for a long time. Munro, of course, is part of the postmodemist, post-structuralist way-which does not work toward a "well-wrought urn," finished and polished, to be admired from a distance. Her stories require moving around in, absorbing, constructing. Reader becomes subject rather than indirect object. It is still probably the case that most people read Munro's stories from the beginning, through the middle, to the end. It is pleasing to stand back to see the whole design. But it is even more gratifying to linger, to read back and forth, to let the stories poem.

 Munro: All pictures. The reasons for
 things happening I seemed vaguely to
 know, but could not explain; I expected
 all that would come clear later. The
 main thing was that it seemed true to
 me, not real but true, as if I had
 discovered, not made up such people and
 such a story, as if that town was lying
 close behind the one I walked through
 every day. (LGW 206)

 Hancock: You like the story to have
 several layers of meaning and intent.
 Munro: What I like is not to really
 know what the story is all about. 
 And for me to keep trying to find out.
 Hancock: What makes a story interesting
 for you?
 Munro: The thing that I don't know and
 that I will discover as I go along.
 (Hancock 84)

Yes. I understand. I did not know that geranium (cranesbill-the real geranium) has purplish blue flowers and that it would add serenity to a place of shadow and texture. I did not know that a firm line around the garden, where it meets the lawn, would allow for more chaos within it. I still don't know what witchhazel will do in a garden. At one time, I might have thought that the associations with witchhazel were "varied and powerful," but now I will watch to see how it grows and how much water it needs.

 Hancock: Are there on-going mythic
 undertones in any of your stories?
 Munro: Not that I am aware of.  No. It
 is what I keep returning to.  That I
 don't get time to think about these
 things because I am always involved
 in this immediate task.  It is almost
 as if I always write from that small
 place out.  I never write from an idea,
 a myth or a pattern.  Or any of the big
 perceptions. (Hancock 1 13)

Patterson in his bathtub. Probably I do not think much about Eden while I pick slugs off the hostas. Which, I suppose, is not to say that it is not there somewhere, lurking in the background. Munro does say, "the sight of the two women crocheting tablecloths can get me all excited-as if it is tied into something farbiggerthan itself '(Hancock 1 14), but she moves immediately, she says, into writing the story, into working with that "fluid energy," rather than distancing herself to think about its implications-which would kill the story.

Helene Cixous on myth and women:
So for the sons of the Book: research, the desert, inexhaustible space, encouraging, discouraging, the march straightahead. For the daughters of the housewife: the straying into the forest. [Is that why I have left wild spaces in the garden?] Deceived, disappointed, but brimming with curiosity. Instead of the great enigmatic duel with the Sphinx, the dangerous questioning addressed to the body of the Wolf. What is the body for? Myths end up having our hides. Logos opens its great maw, and swallows us whole. (Coming to Writing 14-15)

Practice versus process. Talking with the wolf, dangerous as it might be, is at least conversation with a live animal. The winding paths of the forest are more complex than the straight ahead march on the desert. But I do not want to give up the Sphinx, either. Why should she be left to the "sons of the Book?"

  Astilbe. Perhaps the astilbe
  is my greatest love-amongloves in this
  garden. Maybe because I discovered one 
  in a back corner of a nursery and 
  brought it here to try, to see if it
  could grow in this shadow, in this clay
  soil. In June, itsfeathery blooms rise
  through the garden like candles: mauve,
  pink, white, burgundy. But I would not
  care if it never bloomed. The
  stateliness of its branching
  would be enough.  As would its name,
  from Greek words meaning "not 
  glittering. Which reminds me that much
  of my pleasure in this garden comes
  from its not-glittering, its green and
  quiet presence, full of windsong,
  birdsong, and healing.

Close to the beginning of his conversation with Munro, Geoff Hancock says:

 I see you as much a poet as a short
 story writer. 
 Munro: I like you saying that but I've
 written very little poetry.  I began to
 write poetry when I was about-oh-twelve,
 I guess, and I wrote it all through my
 teens.  And then during my first
 pregnancy I wrote a lot of poems which
 I sent off under an assumed name and
 they weren't very good.  They were all
 sent back. That is the only time in my
 adult life that I've at all wanted to
 write poetry.  What is the difference
 that makes you see me as a poet rather
 than a story writer?  Hancock; I see
 you as a lyricist, as a songwriter. You
 give voice to our secret selves.
 Munro: That's absolutely what I 
 think a short story can do.(Hancock 76)

They then leave the topic there, but I would agree with Hancock that it is easy to see Munro as a poet. Not only for the reasons they set out between them, but also because of the way the stories work, through juxtaposition, image, the rhythm of language, space, layers, the suggestive: all poetic uses of language. Munro talks about the whole process in the way a poet doeswhich may be one of the reasons why we find it hard to assimilate the things she tells us about her ways in to stories. They are like a poet's way. That deep entry into reverie, waiting with an idea, an image, until it begins to find its form seems to me a way closely associated with poetry. But then, it may be that, at base, the creative process is poetic, is "making:" why do we talk about a "poetics" of almost anything? Munro and Metcalf had an interesting exchange about language. I appreciated his way of offering her actual passages of her writing to talk about.

 Metcalf: There's a passage which
 struck me very forcibly when I was
 reading it in Lives of Girls and 
 Women which describes one of the
 Aunts sitting on her verandah in a
 rocking chair.  And if I could just
 read a very brief passage from that and
 explain to you the kind of thing that I
 mean . . .
 She sat on the verandah in the wicker
 rocker, wearing, in spite of the hot
 weather, some stately, layered dress,
 dark and trembling with beads, a large
 hat like a turban, earth-coloured
 stockings which she would sometimes roll
 down, to let the bandages "breathe."

 Now, when I first read that, the word
 that leapt out at me was earthcoloured.
 The immediate thing is its accuracy of
 observation, of colour. But it seems to
 me that the word earth-coloured
 operates simultaneously on three or four
 levels.  Well let me be very pedantic
 and boring and laborious about it but
 earth-coloured starting off
 primarily from the observation and then
 moving into the sort of earth mother
 idea almost ... And earth in the sense
 of 'peasant like' and ,oppressed' and
 always when I read your writing I find
 it operates on me in very much the same
 way that poetry does . . . That there
 are levels of meaning and compression
 that are suddenly packed into something,
 yet, it all seems to flow very naturally
 from something acutely observed in the
 first place.  Now what's your
 attitude to craft in your own writing?
 Munro: Well, let's think about why ...
 why one uses that word.  If you think
 of the stockings they could be clay
 coloured, they  could be mud coloured
 ... um ... when I choose a word 
 ... uh ... I wouldn't, for instance
 think of the connotations of ...
 peasant or earth mother or dirt or
 anything like that.  But the quality of
 the word earth to me has a
 ... I'm not able to say very well
 ... It's something even about the
 vowels and the r sound that reaches
 something that I mean to say about this
 person ... but that sounds ridiculous. 
 That doesn't make any sense.  It's the
 sound, the sound itself ... 
 And mud wouldn't do it ... 
 (Metcalf 55-56)

A brave articulation on Alice's part. And, of course, it does make sense. What she is describing is a poet's way of choosing words. Metcalf is right too, that the word as placed, in the end, has all those kinds of resonances for a reader. But for Munro, the sound, as it relates to the character is the primary concern. I suspect it also builds on the rhythm and sound of the rest of the passage. The phrase which stood out for me this time of reading was trembling with beads. It has the r sound, a bit lighter, which deepens almost into a grunt in earth-the kind of sound this woman would make as she stands up. The trembling with beads shows me a woman reaching for fashion, a slightly out-of-date fashion-like the blackjet beads Victorian matrons wore-an attempt at a sort of grandeur, and it shows me a woman unsure of herself-the beads tremble with her breath-in a way, they betray her. "Style" encloses her-in stockings she has to roll down so that the bandages under them can "breathe-" in beads which give her away and in a too heavy layered dress: more weight for her to carry. Patterson's bare knees. He is not caught in this self-immolation caused by style. He-and Munro-are preoccupied with things beyond themselves, beyond style. There is no place in their world for trembling with beads or sweltering in too many clothes, worrying about fashion or style.

I like Metcalf s point about the "compression" of this writing, that it has the effects of poem. A person can linger a long time over a paragraph like this in Munro-which becomes like a stanza in a poem. It is part of the effect she says she wants when she invites a reader to enter these stories anywhere and linger in the "rooms" she has created. That cannot happen in a story which is driving itself forward, in one direction, along a plot line. Munro and Metcalf went on to talk further about words:

 Metcalf: Would you regard the way that
 I respond to that word as being
 ridiculous?
 Munro: No. No. You just analyse a bit
 further than I do.  I know that it has
 to be that word for some reason that I
 don't go into.  I'm just satisfied when
 I know the word is right.
 Metcalf: But when you are writing you
 have this extremely conscious care and
 choice about finding the exact word for
 an exact place within the rhythm?
 Munro: Yes.  And it isn't so much 
 exactness in the meaning sense. 
 It's an emotional exactness ...
 an exactness of resonance.
 Metcalf. It's deliberate but it's
 not conscious.  Could we put it
 that way?
 Munro: Yes, I think so.  Sometimes the
 word comes right away ... the right word
 ... you might say it's not deliberate. 
 But in other cases the word has to be
 sought for ... But not sought for in a
 dictionary or a thesaurus or anything
 like that or not sought for because of
 its official meaning. (Metcalf 56)

Such a hard thing to talk about. I admire both of them for trying. Curious that we have so little language to talk about these processes. Probably because most writers feel that too much talk about them scares them away, that words in the right place are a kind of gift to be accepted and treasured. Too much analysis of it seems disrespectful, somehow, like looking the proverbial gift horse in the mouth. There is a great deal of courage involved in waiting for or looking for, as Munro says, the right word: so that the small bell rings inside her and she knows that the word is right. It takes courage and discipline to hear that bell, to learn to trust it. It also requires the kind of stillness which Munro insists is essential to her.

 Metcalf: There was a very interesting
 passage which was quoted by various
 reviewers of Lives of Girls and
 Women ... some of them admiringly,
 some of them pityingly ... in the
 epilogue ... where the heroine of the
 book talks about her desire to write
 down and capture the reality of
 Jubilee ...
And no list could hold what I
   wanted,for what I wanted was every
   last thing, every layer of speech
   and thought, stroke of light on bark
   or walls, every smell, pothole, pain,
   crack, delusion, held still and held
   together-radiant, everlasting.
 It seems that in all your writing you
 glory in the surfaces and textures.I
 don't know how to put this question to
 you without sounding philosophical or
 pompous but do you feel 'surfaces' not
 to be surfaces? 
 Munro: Yes. Yes. I know exactly what
 you mean.  I feel that everything
 . . . Yes. I don't know how to answer
 your question without sounding pompous
 or ... pseudo-mystical ... It's very
 easy to sound this way when you're
 trying to explain what you feel about
 the way things look and the tones in
 people's voices ... and ... it's
 probably ... there's this kind of
 magic ... you know ... about
 everything. (Metcalf 56)

Yes. About Patterson's knees in the bathtub. About the light on my garden at 4:30 in the afternoon. About the bell inside that rings when the work is right. About the density of the words Munro discovers and places. About the wide spaces around and under the surfaces of our attempts to talk about these things. About the trickery of surfaces.

 Patterson: Water has a graphic dynamic
 as well.  Its capacity for reflecting
 and blocking light is such an important
 characteristic that we can think of
 water surfaces as being constantly
 painted and repainted by light. (90)

Metcalf went on to ask Munro whether it is possible to gain the texture of a place as an adult-that texture which a writer has to have--or at least which Munro confirms that she has to have. Munro replies that she has not been able to, and that worries her some because in this time, a person should be able to write about anywhere-but she cannot-and so perhaps that makes her anachronistic... "butsowhat?" Sometimes,I think that is why I am making a garden: to learn the smells and textures of this earth, of this place where I did not grow up. And which Munro helps me to learn.

 Petunia. "One lonely little
   petunia in an onion patch: song from
   when I was little.  So that I find it
   hard to take this small flower
   seriously.  Also the name of a solemn,
   droop-eared Bassett hound I knew in
   Montreal.  But when there are no
   petunias in a summer, I miss them. 
   This year, there is a gentle one, with
   a blush of yellow.  It pleases me that
   its name comes from petyn, a South
   American Guarani wordfor tobacco,
   where the yn is pronounced in the way
   of the French "un."

 Munro: I wrote an essay several years
 ago for my friend John Metcalf, in
 which I said something that got a
 surprised reaction from readers-and
 their surprise surprised me. I said
 that I don't always, or even usually,
 read stories from beginning to end.
 I start anywhere and proceed in either
 direction.  So it appears that I'm
 not readingat least in an efficient
 way-to find out what happens. I do
 find out, and I'm interested in
 finding out, but there's much more to
 the experience. A story is not like a
 road to follow, I said, it's more like
 a house. You go inside and stay there
 for a while, wandering back and forth
 and settling where you like and
 discovering how the room and corridors
 relate to each other, how the world
 outside is altered by being viewed
 from these windows.  And you, the
 visitor, the reader, are altered as
 well by being in this enclosed space,
 whether it is ample and easy or full
 of crooked turns, or sparsely or
 opulently furnished. You can go back
 again and again, and the house, the
 story, always contains more than you
 saw the last time.  It also has a
 sturdy sense of itself, of being built
 of its own necessity, not just to
 shelter or beguile you.  To deliver
 a story like that, durable and
 freestanding, is what I'm always
 hoping for. (Selected Stories xvii)

Stylebetrays. Pattern or blueprint proves inadequate. Surfaces aredeceiving. Practice may not include enough dimensions. Process trusts winding paths-in houses, gardens, forests, stories. Fashion followed, "trembling with beads," has nothing to do with Munro or her stories. Munro has a stance to the world, an approach to writing, a way of seeing the graphics on surfaces and looking deep within them. And she shows us not a prechosen, fixed, unchanging way of writing or seeing, but a deep integrity whichinsistsonfindingitswayinto whatever is interesting, especially what is not well understood, or talked about, to find the angle of vision from which it can be experienced, and then to find the way to construct that: "a way of telling a story...... with a sturdy sense of itself." A task always changing, always shifting, always demanding different f-stops or lenses, waiting for the right light, listening for the right word. Daring the difficult journey, the trip taken alone.

Works Cited

Cixous, Helene. "Coming to Writing" and Other Essays. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 1991.

Hancock, Geoff. "An Interview with Alice Munro," Canadian Fiction Magazine. 43 (1982): 74-114.

Metcalf, John. "A Conversation with Alice Munro," Journal of Canadian Fiction. 1.4 (1972): 54-62.

Munro, Alice. Lives of Girls and Women. Toronto: Penguin, 1990. First published Toronto: McGraw-Hill-Ryerson, 1971.

___."What Is Real?" Making It New: Contemporary Canadian Stories. Ed. John Metcalf. Toronto: Methuen, 1982. 223-26.

___."Introduction," Selected Stories. Toronto: Penguin, 1998. First published as a Douglas Gibson Book by McClelland and Stewart, 1996.

Patterson, Freeman. Portraits of Earth. Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1997 (First published 1987).

Rasporich, Beverly. "Alice: the Woman behind the Art," Dance of the Sexes: Art and Gender in the Fiction of alice Munro. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1990. 1-31.

Twigg, Alan. "What Is," For Openers: Conversations with 24 Canadian Writers. Madeira Park, B.C.: Harbour Publishing, 1981. 13-20.

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