In the second and third terms of my MFA program in 2006, I wrote my critical essay about Canadian writer and Nobel Laureate Alice Munro. My first drafts discussed several of her stories and my essay ballooned past forty pages, but the final version was just over thirty pages, the maximum I was allowed, and focussed on just one work: Munro’s transgressive short story “Meneseteung” (1990).

My thesis was that Munro broke commonn-sense rules deliberately and effectively in her work, particularly the early collection, Friends of My Youth. Deliberately breaking sensible rules?—how else? Munro considered warnings about introducing too many characters or in “Meneseteung” shifting narrative distance, and she wrote stories that required these transgressions.

I was at the point in Alice Munro’s “Meneseteung” where Almeda hangs grape jelly to drip in the kitchen, when I had to leave my house to do Sunday errands—bakery, grocery store, my mother’s assisted living facility.  I marked my spot in the thick volume of The Best American Short Stories of the Century, picked up my personal journal, and drove off with the dog in the back seat.  Somewhere on the drive to town, I realized that I must already have read this story in the Best American of 1989.  Before that, it appeared in The New Yorker.  Perhaps I first found Munro’s story there.  Wherever I originally read this story, it took time for me to understand what Munro’s work can teach me as a writer.  

In the parking lot, I opened my journal and noted what I recalled from the story, how the story shifts focus further and further away from the narrator, seating itself more and more firmly into the head of the historical (fictional) “poetess” Almeda.  I listed this progression:  the volume of Almeda’s poetry, the newspaper and archival photos, speculation about her daily life, Almeda listening to the fight in the alley the night before her life changed—artifact, research, guesswork, scene.  I had reached full scene in Munro’s story before I left home.  As soon as I recognized the progression, I thought,  At the end Munro will have to return to the narrator.

Discovering that I was correct was even more surprising because The New Yorker trimmed Munro’s ending to remove those final narrative observations where he or she admits to the fiction.

“I thought that there wasn’t anybody alive in the world but me who would know this, who would make the connection.  And I would be the last person to do so.  But perhaps this isn’t so.  People are curious.  A few people are.  They will be driven to find things out, even trivial things.  They will put things together.  You see them going around with notebooks, scraping the dirt off gravestones, reading microfilm, just in the hope of seeing this trickle in time, making a connection, rescuing one thing from the rubbish.  

“And they may get it wrong, after all.  I may have got it wrong.  I don’t know if she ever took laudanum.  Many ladies did.  I don’t know if she ever made grape jelly.”

In “Meneseteung” Alice Munro proves that limitations such as of point of view and narrative distance, like everything about fiction, are imaginary. Almeda Roth makes jelly in nineteenth century Ontario—the fictional event created in service of fictional characters described by a fictional twentieth century narrative persona. Where is the truth here? How can a modern-day researcher describe the inner thoughts of a woman who died a hundred years before? Why would any reader believe this? Layers of invention—yet still I know Almeda hung her jelly bag between two chairs to drip through the night, the same night a woman was nearly beaten to death beside her back garden, and her neighbor found her vulnerable enough to marry. Readers believe some stories with even greater certainty than those events they experience. That is certainly true for me. As a writer I glory in Munro’s skillful manipulation of story, but as a reader I recognize the complexity of her story as true. As clearly as I recall sitting in the parking lot at the grocery store, I see Almeda Joynt Roth. I reach out to her through my own experiences making jelly, hearing sounds in the night, sitting in an outhouse. I believe Almeda’s life changes with the plop, plup of purple jelly, screams in the night, and “her escaping blood.”

Happy Canada Day, Alice Munro! I owe you.