Douglas Gibson was an editor at the cusp of his career when he first met Alice Munro, LLD’76, in the fall of 1974. As it turns out, Munro, who had already published three books at the time, was likewise at the cusp of hers.
“I was a young editor in publishing in Toronto, so much a young editor I couldn’t afford a car. Through a mutual friend I arranged to have dinner in London with this superstar, Alice Munro,” said Gibson, who has been Munro’s editor since that day. “As far as I was concerned, she was just a superbly successful writer, so I thought I was about to have dinner with this superstar, whose career was rising like a comet.”
Munro, winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature, had already received the 1968 Governor General’s Award for her first collection of short stories, Dance of the Happy Shades. At dinner, Gibson expected to “worshipfully sit at the feet ” of Munro. But the meeting didn’t go as planned.
“What I found was an Alice in crisis. She told me everyone around her – all writers, book reviewers, publishers and booksellers – everyone in the book business was saying, ‘Alice, you have to stop writing short stories. This short story stuff is never going to work. People aren’t going to take you seriously. You’ve got to write novels.’”
Because the advice was so unanimous, Munro took it seriously – so seriously she had stopped writing the stories for which she is known – and was trying to write novels. She couldn’t do it. At dinner, Munro told Gibson she was “blocked” and “unable to write at all.” He urged her to continue with short stories, and told her if she came and published with him, she would never hear a request for a novel.
And that changed everything.
That was the day Munro decided she was a writer of short stories, Gibson said, alluding to words from the writer herself in Robert Thacker’s biography, Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives. The two have collaborated on more than a dozen collections of short stories since, watching praises, awards and accolades roll in.
In retrospect, Gibson said, Munro so obviously made the right decision. Her talent as a wordsmith in the form can be credited with changing the literary landscape, and specifically, mitigating negative conceptions of short stories.
“Tradition goes against the short story in that the novel, from early 19th century onwards, was the big event. It was the form associated with literacy and great writing and the short story was always in that shadow,” Gibson explained.
“In Canada, there was a prejudice from publishers and book stores doing orders and that prejudice was hard to shake. But it’s been shaken very successfully in Canada, largely thanks to Alice Munro, and people who would read her and say ‘I never liked short stories, but Alice is really terrific.’”
In some sense, Munro, and the huge sales that followed her books, paved the way for other Canadian greats in the form, including Mavis Gallant and Alistair MacLeod. Canada sells more short stories than the United States and United Kingdom, and sells them better, Gibson noted.
“Alice has managed to compress so much life into this short story form, and that’s quite remarkable. Every time I read a new Alice Munro short story, I put it down and look at the ceiling and say, ‘How does she know so much about people, other people, and other people’s lives?’ That’s the key to all this – this superb, sensitive intelligence behind all of her stories,” Gibson added.
Over the years, the writer-editor relationship has been “wonderful” between him and Munro, he added. The pair weathered a storm in the early days, one he laughs about to this day.
“The worst moment was the very first book, Who Do You Think You Are? The book was already at the printers; Alice wanted to change the entire second half to first person, and add a new story,” Gibson said.
It was, quite literally a “stop-the-presses” kind of situation. But he read the new story, and thought, ‘Alice is right.’ The new story was terrific and it changed the texture of the whole book. He could see why she wanted to change the second half. The printer felt the same way. The presses stopped, the book was changed, Munro added in the new material – the title story in the collection, Who Do You Think You Are?
It won the 1978 Governor General’s Award.
“One thing you have to know is, not only is she universally admired for her short stories, she’s universally admired as a person. When the Nobel Prize came through, it was total jubilation, excitement all around,” Gibson said of Munro.
For the Western community reading Munro’s Dear Life, the last installment in this session of Western Reads, Gibson has the following words.
“The last three stories are clearly different from any in the book, and any Alice has written, because they’re so clearly personal and autobiographical,” he noted.
Allow yourselves to be swept away into the lives within the stories, and to walk away, enriched by the experience, Gibson said.
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GET YOUR READ ON: The Book Store at Western is hosting an on-campus book club for Western Reads’ April selection, Dear Life by Alice Munro. Join fellow readers from 12-1 p.m. on Wednesday, April 22, to share your thoughts on this national bestseller. RSVP to Pam Kenward at pmcarthu@uwo.ca. An evening event follows at 7 p.m. at the Community gallery, Museum London. Register at alumni.westernu.ca/learn/western-reads/.