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J. R. (Tim) Struthers, ed., Thank You for Visiting: Essays on Alice Munro’s Works III (Toronto: Guernica, 2025)

Anne-Sophie Letessier
p. 259-263
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J. R. (Tim) Struthers, ed., Thank You for Visiting: Essays on Alice Munro’s Works III (Toronto: Guernica, 2025)

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1Thank You for Visiting: Essays on Alice Munro’s Works III is the third volume edited by J. R. (Tim) Struthers. Like the earlier Alice Munro Country: Essays on Her Works I and Alice Munro Everlasting: Essays Her Works II (Guernica, 2020), it is characterized by the heterogeneity and eclecticism of the twenty-four contributions, ten of which are reprinted or adapted from previously published material. They range from personal pieces by people who knew and worked with Munro, like editors Anne Close and Douglas Gibson, Huron County librarian Reg Thompson and W. D. Weldon librarian John Tyndall, to the five-part composite essay assembled from the blog Charles E. May dedicated to the short-story genre and Margaret Atwood’s introduction to Carried Away: A Selection of Stories. Interspersed with those are scholarly essays by eminent Munro scholars, some of whom contributed to the two previous volumes. They tackle stories and collections from across the author’s oeuvre, with a special focus on The View from Castle Rock, which testifies to the importance of the book in the scholarship on Munro. Unlike Alice Munro Country and Alice Munro Everlasting, the title chosen by Struthers says little about what might be the leading thread or the specific focus of the volume. The different essays adopt a variety of perspectives, proposing stimulating lines of enquiry which continue some of the discussions to be found in the 2020 anthologies.

2That “stories have their own exigencies of form” is, of course, something of a truism, as Anne Close underlines (11), and therefore cannot exhaust the complexities and sophistication of Munro’s writing, as evidenced by the contributions which reflect on her poetics. Interweaving previous scholarship on Munro and discussions of members of the ConstantReader book club, Catherine Sheldrick Ross ponders the significance of the phrase “Save the Reaper” in the eponymous story’s exploration of entrapment, transformation and the relation between the everyday and the world of art. Similarly, the quote from “Tam Lin,” which Munro chose as the title of “Hold Me Fast, Don’t Let Me Pass,” serves as the premise to Ailsa Cox’s discussion of the role of Scottish balladry, folklore and oral history in creating the sense that the fictional world is at once mundane and mysterious. Corinne Bigot further delves into the similarity between “historical detective work” and fictive reconstruction (Cox 157) in her analysis of Munro’s handling of the epistolary in “Wilderness Station,” a story, she contends, which is primarily concerned with the process of writing and interpreting. John Metcalf and Ryan Porter both look at the way early stories by Munro testify to the evolution of her writing. Metcalf discusses the primacy of image in conveying the storyline and emotional weight in “Walker Brothers Cowboy.” Porter focuses on the first version of “Home” and on the way Munro attempts to capture the experience of bewilderment and dislocation when discovering the unrecognizable home-place by leaving out the personal past.

3A number of the volume’s contributors share their experience of Munro’s (literary) geography, whether it be Souwesto, painter Greg Curnoe’s name for the region of southwestern Ontario (Reg Thompson, Taylor Marie Graham), or Scotland (Douglas Gibson, Isla Duncan). Other contributors, like Ryan Porter, Noah Kovicki and Paul Barrett, preface their essays by stating that their critical reading of Munro is informed by their own relation to Souwesto. As playwright Taylor Marie Graham notes in her essay on stage adaptations of Munro’s stories and on the writing of her play Post Alice, the family house in Huron County and the surrounding area is a writerly obsession which has been discussed by a number of critics over the years—Alice Munro Country had already contributed to shifting this longstanding discussion in new directions. Noah Kovicki, who adopts an approach informed by archetypal criticism, draws on authors from Charles Sangster to George Elliott in an attempt to trace the genealogy of the cultural and literary mythos of small-town Ontario in which to situate Munro’s own mythologizing. Focusing on “No Advantages,” the opening story of The View from Castle Rock, Struthers suggests it entices readers to read the text through the prism of mythopoeia rather than realism. William Butt takes up on Struthers’s idea that some of Munro’s stories are “instances of the ‘brief epic’ form” (4) and construes The View from Castle Rock as enacting the “epic battle” between “exuberant tellers of tales” and the “mono-mythopaths led by the Reverend Boston” (281; 287).

4Both Butt and Struthers pay particular attention to the figure of Thomas Botton in Munro’s exploration of her Scottish Presbyterian heritage. That the cultural Christianity of rural southwestern Ontario “provided ample material for Munro” (Atwood 51) is an established critical path. Atwood and Alyda Faber veer the discussion away from considerations on social perspective to explore how Christianity relates to Munro’s image making and story-telling. In the final pages of her essay, Atwood proposes to construe the way many of Munro’s stories end as pertaining to “an acceptance of both/at once mystery” similar to the one sustaining a central tenet of Christianity—incarnation (51). When identifying Munro as the “heir to . . . the imaginative exuberance of the ‘near-pagan’ storyteller and the Calvinist naysayer,” Faber’s study of “What Do You Want to Know For?” resonates with Butt’s and Struthers’s readings. Her contention, however, is that “the overt swerve away from orthodox belief structure clears imaginative space for what is a fresh (if indirect) approach to the idea . . . of God” (254).

5Dennis Duffy prefaces his analysis of “the struggle between the tamed and the unruly” (144) in “Meneseteung” by underscoring that it is “settler history” and that, with the exception of the Ojibwe word which gives the story its title, Indigenous prior occupation of the land “does not figure in this account of experience” (145). The articulation of land, history and settler-colonialism—and it might be addressed when reading Munro—constitutes another, albeit tenuous, thread in the volume. Paul Barret explicitly engages with the question when, drawing on Corall Ann Howell’s essay on Munro’s language of mapping in Alice Munro Country, he examines how land figures as a “deceptively complex symbol of both belonging and historical continuity” (196). What lies between the apparent surface and the unknowable depth, he contends, are the “political processes and subaltern histories” that have shaped Souwesto and escape Munro’s settler vision (206). Conversely, fiction writer Stephen Michael, who takes up on Alec Follett’s essay reading Munro through the lens of bioregionalism, proposes an approach inspired by Sto:lo author Lee Maracle’s notions of “Indigenous responsibility” as a way to reshape how literature is written and read “on this land” (129).

6Readers of Thank You for Visiting might be nonplussed at grand comments such as “Alice Munro is the best short-story writer in the world today” (May 329), unless they are to be read as expressions of what Atwood describes as the author’s “elevation to international literary sainthood” (41). Perhaps more surprising for a volume published in 2025, no mention is made of the scandal which erupted in July 2024 after the publication of Andrea Skinner’s article on her mother in the Toronto Star. This might be an editorial choice—criticism on Munro has long moved beyond the autobiographical—, but might equally be put down to the inherently slow editorial and publishing process: Taylor Marie Graham, whose Post Alice centers on the question of sexual violence thus explicitly addresses how Skinner’s revelations bear on the significance of her play in a CBC interview. The language used in the press—“Alice Munro: should we still read a fallen saint?” (The Week) and “Saints and Sinners” (Times Literary Supplement), to quote but two—heavily underscores issues of morality. Ethics, rather than morality, has been one of the new fruitful lines of enquiry into Munro’s oeuvre, as evidenced by Amelia De Falco and Lorriane York’s collection Ethics and Affects in the Fiction of Alice Munro (2018).

7“What did I have left to say?” Struthers asks in the opening essay of the volume. It would be trite to mention the abundance of the literature on Munro. Struthers himself chronicles his own engagement with Munro’s stories and the scholarship it has prompted in an essay which concludes on a bibliography of the critical books and special issues of journals since 2013, the year when Munro received the Nobel Prize in literature. Instead, Struthers answers with a quote from “Who Do You Think You Are?”—“What could she say about herself and Ralph Gillespie, except that she felt his life, close, closer than the lives of men she’d loved, one slot over from her own?”—, noting that there is no “declaration more fitting to describe the feelings of so many remarkable readers about the ever-mesmerizing work of Alice Munro” (3). This may ultimately shed light on what underpins the volume: not only is Thank You for Visiting about “celebrating” the author (3), but it strives to offer a broad view on the reception of Munro. In including both original contributions and previously published essays by long-time Munro scholars like Struthers, Sheldrick Ross, Duncan, Cox, and Bigot, along with new voices, the volume evidences at once the complexity of Munro’s body of work and the wealth of perspectives its readers have adopted. Munro is no longer in need of “periodic rediscovery,” as Atwood wrote in 2006 (41), but her stories continue to be re-visited.

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Bibliographie

De Falco, Amelia and Lorriane York, eds. Ethics and Affects in the Fiction of Alice Munro. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Print.

Howells, Coral Ann. “Intimate Dislocations: Buried History and Geography in Alice Munro’s Souwesto Stories.” Alice Munro Country: Essays on Her Works I. Ed. J. R. (Tim) Struthers. Toronto: Guernica, 2020. 139-53. Print.

Follett, Alec. “‘The Region That I Know’: The Bioregional View in Alice Munro’s The View from Castle Rock.” Alice Munro Country: Essays on Her Works I. Ed. J. R. (Tim) Struthers. Toronto: Guernica, 2020. 115-37. Print.

Struthers, J. R. (Tim), ed. Alice Munro Country: Essays on Her Works I. Toronto: Guernica, 2020. Print.

Struthers, J. R. (Tim), ed. Alice Munro Everlasting: Essays on Her Works II. Toronto: Guernica, 2020. Print.

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Anne-Sophie Letessier, « J. R. (Tim) Struthers, ed., Thank You for Visiting: Essays on Alice Munro’s Works III (Toronto: Guernica, 2025) »Journal of the Short Story in English, 85 | 2025, 259-263.

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Anne-Sophie Letessier, « J. R. (Tim) Struthers, ed., Thank You for Visiting: Essays on Alice Munro’s Works III (Toronto: Guernica, 2025) »Journal of the Short Story in English [En ligne], 85 | Automn 2025, mis en ligne le 12 décembre 2025, consulté le 16 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/4990

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Anne-Sophie Letessier

Université Jean Monnet – Saint-Étienne, ECLLA

Anne-Sophie Letessier is a senior lecturer at the Université Jean Monnet-Saint Etienne, where she is affiliated to the research group ECLLA (Etudes du Contemporain en Littératures, Langues, Arts). Her PhD dissertation, which focused on the politics and poetics of intermediality in Canadian novelist Jane Urquhart’s landscape writing, won the 2018 SEPC Award for best PhD thesis in the field of postcolonial studies. She has presented and published papers on issues relating to the perception and representation of space in contemporary English Canadian literature.

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