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.
Interests: Reading, writing, not arithmetic. The art and craft of poetry. Photography. Vegetable and flower gardening especially heirloom bulbs and dahlias. Movies in real theatres. Theatre on real stages. Art in real galleries. Crossword puzzles and, of course, Wordle. Singer-songwriters like Aimee Mann and Patti Griffin. All kinds of music especially 1930s jazz. Venice, Italy! The Dude abides.
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- Wishing Tree - November 4, 2024
