Globe staff and readers share their favourite Alice Munro stories

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Alice Munro told the stories of everyday women and girls, elevating their inner lives into a rare art that was both deeply relatable and universal. This exceptional talent earned her the Nobel Prize in 2013 as a “master of the contemporary short story,” making her the first Canadian to win the prize for literature. She also won two Gillers and the Man Booker International Prize, among other awards. Well before her death at the age of 92 this week, she left an indelible mark on Canadian literature and the short story craft.

Here, Globe writers, editors and readers reflect on their Munro’s legacy and their favourite stories.

Runaway

Sometimes reading an Alice Munro story feels like a gut punch. It’s piercing; it takes your breath away. This is how I feel when I read Runaway. The title short story of the Giller-Prize-winning collection published in 2004 draws you into the lives of Carla and Clark. Munro doesn’t dance around the fact that Clark is a controlling, angry and psychopathic mini-monster. We all know the type; we live with them all around us.

What we discover through Munro’s telling is the hold he has over Carla, who at 18 is lulled by his handsomeness and the promise of an exciting future away from her parents. Her happiness, her very identity, is wound up in her need for his approval, which he wields like a stick. Carla’s one consolation, her pet goat, Flora, disappears. Munro wrote this almost as a whodunnit: Will Carla escape? Will she begin a relationship with her kind but needy neighbour? Who will she betray to save herself? What has happened to Flora? Who is the runaway in the title – Carla? Flora? Or is it an exhortation: Run Away! For anyone who has tried to leave a partner like Clark, the gut aches as Munro drives her sharp prose forward to the epiphany – for Carla, for all the women who suffer. RIP Ms. Munro. – Angela Murphy, foreign editor

Royal Beatings

A couple years ago, I was talking with a dear friend on the phone. She was trying to think of a certain turn of phrase Alice Munro used; it had become a splinter of half-remembered text lodged in her head. The title of the story in which it appeared was Royal Beatings, and, finding it, she read to me the passage in question: “ … Even the tearing of a piece of toilet paper, the shifting of a haunch, was audible to those working or talking or eating in the kitchen. They were all familiar with each other’s nether voices, not only in their more explosive moments but in their intimate sighs and growls and pleas and statements.” Nether voices! We laughed in admiration and delight. Nether voices! The phrasing became a touchstone between us.

Royal Beatings, as the title suggests, has its share of violence and misery, simultaneously lurid and beautifully contained by Munro’s corseting intellect. Why then choose to memorialize this passage? Because Munro isn’t simply writing about poop sounds. She’s describing the damage wrought by ill-conceived propriety; she’s acknowledging the way that base truths, unacknowledged, are uglier for the fact of their refusal. She’s talking about the shame attached to certain things, whether emotional or corporal, that lie below the surface, and at the same time she is performing an act of exposure, freeing us all – a service she performed for decades with perfect, graceful, exacting prose, always fresh, always realer than real. – Lisan Jutras, copy editor

‘A prized possession’

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Back in 1977, my wife, Barbara, was a third-year English student at the University of British Columbia.

The subject in her CanLit class that year was the book Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro. Barb had some questions for the author, who, by then, was living in Clinton, Ont. Was the book autobiographical, she wondered. Were the stories in it true? Did it take long to write?

Barb located a copy of Canadian Who’s Who in the campus library, which included contact information for the author.

That February, a letter arrived at Barb’s parents’ home. Dated Feb. 17, 1977, it began: “Your letter delighted me. I’m always glad if Lives stands up to rereading. When you present a book to the world, it’s not just a piece of work but a whole attitude you present, it’s a way of seeing things and when people accept or reject it that is really what they’re dealing with.”

Munro went on to say Lives was autobiographical but most incidents in it were invented. She said the “scene at the dance hall takes my own feeling and experiences of such dances and builds a scene to show that ….”

My wife was ecstatic to receive the correspondence. It would be the start of a lifelong admiration for Munro – her favourite author. And that letter? Well, it would be treasured like bullion and read again and again over the years. – Gary Mason, columnist

The Bear Came Over The Mountain

There will be no shortage of obituaries that will rightly laud Alice Munro’s command of time: the way she captured how it ruthlessly blisters over us, how she could pluck moments from the slipstream and pull them like taffy. That gift hit me like a tidal wave when I first read the 1999 story The Bear Came Over The Mountain, centred around a woman with dementia, while my grandmother was living with the disease herself.

In about as many words as it took for this ungainly writer to produce this short reflection, Munro distills then injects the fullness of Fiona and her life with her husband Grant into our minds before dumping us out – pitilessly, by just paragraph four – into her final years. I was pierced by razor-sharp details that I knew too well: Grant’s burst of hope from a ray of clarity; the “brief and friendly and maddening conversations” used in vain to mortar over growing distance; the guilt of depositing loved ones in custodial homes or in front of a TV. (Tragically, Munro herself suffered from dementia for at least a decade.) Staggeringly, these are just painterly details to a drama that’s really about the meaning of marriage – a contrapasso for Grant as the former philanderer watches Fiona fall for an old friend, Aubrey, in the care home.

Munro’s understanding of time’s unsparing nature is what made her a master of her brutal metier; she knew that all our stories, in the end, are short. “It’s just life,” Aubrey’s wife says. “You can’t beat life.” – Adrian Lee, content editor

Lives of Girls and Women

In my second year of university, I read Lives of Girls and Women in my English class. There was something about Munro’s writing that really caught me off guard and made me pay attention. Her stories were about things that seemed so simple from the outside, but she was able to portray ordinary moments with such clarity and depth of emotion that I was often left thinking about them for days after. It changed the way I thought about my own writing. A few years after I first encountered Alice Munro, one of my own short stories won the youth prize at the Alice Munro Festival of the Short Story. It gave me the encouragement to keep writing. – Menaka Raman-Wilms, host of The Decibel

‘Welcome to Alice Munro country’

You couldn’t see a sign for Clinton, Ont., without thinking you’re in Alice Munro country.

One weekend we went for a coffee in Goderich, near Clinton. “Oh,” my partner said, “Look at that romantic older couple holding hands.” I turned – it was her. Unmistakably Alice. With a big, rugged handsome fella, her second husband, who would be described three years later – in his obituary in the Clinton News Record – as a philosopher, poet and painter, and a “bomb-aimer” with the RCAF from 1942-45. I went up to her and introduced myself, and we chatted. I was reading Charles Foran’s biography of Mordecai Richler that weekend and we talked about it. My own writing may have come up. A year later a tornado levelled that coffee shop. Two years after that, she lost her husband and won the Nobel Prize.

This winter on a beach in the Caribbean I met a literature professor from a private Christian college in Connecticut and we got to talking about books. He asked: The best writer in English in North America? “Alice Munro,” I said, and he nodded.

He had been to Alice Munro country, too. – Sean Fine, justice reporter

‘An impossible ask’

You have asked the impossible of me: To pick a favourite Alice Munro tale. They are all my favourites. Each and every one has something or everything to admire, filled with what one contributor noted was our “nether worlds.” After reading a Munro story I always looked more carefully at the man across the aisle on the bus or the woman ahead of me in the supermarket lineup or those teenage boys swaggering down the sidewalk. She opened eyes, and at the same time gave so much reading pleasure. – Kathryn Woodward, reader

The Turkey Season

The first sentence in my memoir reads “Who would want to read your memoir? You’re not a famous architect like Lord Foster or a Nobel-winning writer like Alice Munro.” I go on to describe how reading The Turkey Season in the New Yorker resonated with me and I came out to my parents shortly thereafter.

I now live in Munro country and drive through Clinton to Goderich regularly. On those drives I think of how her economy of writing captures the mood, history and life in southwestern Ontario. I will re-read her books. – Robert Lemon, reader

Silence

My most memorable story by Alice Munro is Silence, the third of a trilogy about Juliet and her daughter Penelope. I was a young mother myself when I read it. Forget The Shining, Dracula, or Frankenstein, Silence was the ultimate horror story. Imagine your daughter refusing to see you and cutting off all ties, and you have no idea why. It still sends chills up my spine. – Wendy Bonus, reader

Responses have been edited and condensed for clarity