This is Orlando, a podcast about the history of women's writing from medieval times to the present.
In this episode, we visit the archives at the University of Calgary and conduct a live interview about archival work, Canadian literature, and women’s writing in the twentieth century.
We talk to Annie Murray about Alice Munro, a twentieth century writer who is said to have revolutionized the architecture of short stories, exploring the movement of characters either backward or forward in time. Her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, published in 1968, went on to win Canada's highest literary prize – the Governor General's Award. In 2013, Munro received the Nobel Prize, making her the thirteenth woman to receive a nobel prize for literature.
Munro said, “I don’t think about a particular form, I think more about fiction … I want to tell a story, in the old-fashioned way—what happens to somebody—but I want that ‘what happens’ to be delivered with quite a bit of interruption, turnarounds, and strangeness. I want the reader to feel something is astonishing—not the ‘what happens’ but the way everything happens."
Munro’s stories often centre the tangled relationships between men and women, small-town existence, and the fallibility of memory, which readers trace to her background growing up during the Great Depression in rural Huron County, Ontario. As Munro once told an interviewer, “I made stories up all the time. I had a long walk to school, and during that walk I would generally make up stories. As I got older the stories would be more and more about myself, as a heroine in some situation or other, and it didn't bother me that the stories were not going to be published to the world immediately, and I don't know if I even thought about other people knowing them or reading them. It was about the story itself, generally a very satisfying story from my point of view”
We discuss how Munro’s texts made their way to the University of Calgary, and the textual scraps of Munro’s stories as documented by the archives. We take a close look at the drafts of one well-known Munro story, “Royal Beatings,” which tells the story of a young girl’s family life in western Ontario during the Great Depression. We also discuss the intersection between life and story through the non-textual traces of her life – from coffee stains to childrens’ drawings, each manuscript and letter bears the mark of Munro’s daily existence, not unlike her stories themselves.
