Alice Munro's "The Office"

Today's Discussion Leader: Erica (Munro) and Jon (Oates)

Alice Munro, a well known Canadian writer, is a master (I think!) of psychological drama! In an interview for a Canadian fiction magazine she was quoted as saying, "I don't see that people develop and arrive somewhere. I just see people living in flashes." And I think it is these "flashes" that you see in her short fiction!

One of her earliest collections of short fiction includes "The Office," the story that we are reading. From what I understand this story evolved from a real event from early in her marriage. "The Office" centers on a narrator who has evolved a room-of-one's-own menatality and consciousness (to borrow Woolf's words!). In essence, the first person narrator of "The Office," a writer who finds it hard to work at home with her husband and family in the background, yearns for a room of her own, a private space where she can do her creative work, reflecting a major theme in feminist thinking of this period.

Click here for a link to an article that talks about her winning the Booker Prize, one of the most prestigious awards for folks who write fiction.

Click here for her Wikipedia entry!

Click here for a Canadian encyclopedia entry for Munro!

**************************************************************************

Joyce Carol Oates is a prolific American writer, one you should know! She has pubished over fifty novels (which is pretty amazing!). Click here for her Wikipedia entry!

Click here for a great interview with her from the Paris Review!

The short piece we are reading from her, "In the Region of Ice," won a prestigious O.Henry Award in 1967. It shares with some of her earl work a relgious protagonist and a concern for spiritual matters. (this story was even made into a short film in the 1970s, by the way!)

The 1970 collection she put together -- The Wheel of Love -- includes this story and several other of her most famous pieces (including "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?). She has been quoted as saying the unifying theme of these stories is "different forms of love, mainly in family relationships." Many critics have said that she offers a negative portrayal of females (only recently has she been seem as a "feminist" writer, whatever that means!).