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The Apostrophe Blog
The news just came over the wires—well, they are the bits and bytes, ones and zeroes, of the Internet these days I guess. Sometime last night, while I was winging my way back from a visit to my son in Los Angeles, Alice Munro, the Canadian master of the short story and Nobel laureate, died in a Port Hope, Ontario care home after nearly 93 years of a long and interesting life. Her New York Times obituary cites a complimentary quote from the writer, Anne Tyler; I was finishing her novel, Clock Dance, just as my flight took off from the Burbank Hollywood airport.
Munro retired from short story writing a while back and had been suffering numerous health problems in recent years including heart bypass surgery and cancer. I can’t find enough superlatives to describe how much I love love love Alice Munro’s writing. Back in 2013, when Ms. Munro won the Nobel Prize in LIterature, I bought a cake to celebrate and even wrote a poem. Last spring, I re-read her entire oeuvre. What a delight. What a trove of wisdom. What a testimony to the complexity of this human life—our foibles and our triumphs. I even started writing a short summary of each story at the time but I abandoned it when life and the to-do lists intervened. Maybe it is time to start on that project again…
RIP to the GOAT of the short story.
- Published Online after Being in Print: “And I will tell you a story” - September 5, 2024
- Oregon Poetry Association Honorable Mention for a Prose Poem - September 2, 2024
- Playing with Form: The Abecedarian - August 28, 2024