"Give her a room of her own and five hundred a year, let her speak her mind and leave out half that she now puts in, and she will write a better book one of these days." So said Virginia Woolf. McClelland & Stewart, 1998 And although Kath
After a lifetime of collecting, Mr. Joseph Herbert Neill sold 1,000 objects to the county on the condition that they open a museum and appoint him curator. This is the story I imagine lurking behind the Walley museum in the opening paragraphs of "The Love of a Good Woman", behind D.M.
More than twenty years ago, I read Eleven Canadian Novelists in the public library, sharing one of the big wooden tables, traipsing back and forth from my chair to the stacks, fetching the authors' work as desired. Plume, 1971 I hadn't yet read my first Alice Munro book, but
"But you better not cross him or he’ll skin you alive....Like he does with his other stuff." 1994; Penguin, 2007 Liza's father warned her about Ladner, who made his living as a taxidermist, working for museums. It wasn't meant to be taken seriously. Indeed, after that, Liza and
In searching for an image for the last story discussed here, "A Wilderness Station", I came upon a wonderfully long and chatty Paris Review interview with Alice Munro.* Something she says about her reading came to mind when I had finished "Spaceships Have Landed". "Reading was my life really until
