Finding Meaning

I'm on page 305 of Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives, just over halfway through. The book is littered with scraps of paper marking interesting passages. The chief response I have to literary biographies is "So that's how you do it!" There's no one career path for writers, so I think we have to look around and see how others have managed it.

A coherent thematic post is escaping me at the moment (it's 80 degrees outside and I really should be out in the sun on my last day of vacation) but I'll give you some choice quotations for the moment, still on the subject of personal material in writing:

Munro characterized the 1950s -- the time before she wrote "The Peace of Utrecht" -- as the time when her attitude was "I will be a writer." After that story, which takes up the searing "personal material" surrounding her mother's death in 1959, her attitude became "some things have to be written by me." Thus Munro sees the 1950s stories largely as exercises, or what she calls "holding-pattern stories." As with her subsequent characterization of her decision to leave her university studies behind, Munro is mostly persuasive here, but not completely. The stories Munro wrote, submitted, and published during the 1950s are more than exercises; they show her grappling with personal material early on -- perhaps not with the deep feelings like those about her mother, but with the personal material derived from Wingham. (p. 131-132)

[With early 1950s stories] Munro is clearly back home in Wingham -- this is personal material; when Jill Gardiner, of the University of New Brunswick, read it to her during an interview in June 1973, she commented, "And yet, you know, that was not an imagined setting. I actually lived [it] . . . it's all real. It's all there. I did not make it for its meaning. I was trying to find meaning." (p. 134)

I am thinking a lot more about why I work in the realist genre, as Munro does, using personal experience so directly, rather than more obliquely as might be done in other genres like historical or science fiction. I am sure these genres choose us as much as the other way around (I certainly read many genres besides realism, but have never felt drawn to write them). I think looking intentionally at the genre I'm in and its implications for my subject matter may be useful.