Will Nobelist Alice Munro Come Out of Retirement?

The Wall Street Journal, 

22 October,2013 

Photo right - 

Canadian author Alice Munro

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

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Alice Munro, the newly crowned Nobel prize winner for literature, said that she continues to think of ideas for new stories—leaving open the possibility that the Canadian, considered by many as one of the greatest short-story writers, will come out of retirement.
In one of her first interviews since winning the prize, Ms. Munro said she wants any unpublished manuscripts to be destroyed on her death.
Ms. Munro, who is 82, said earlier this year that she wants to retire and relax, given her age and the fact that she has been writing since she was a child. Since winning the prize, Ms. Munro told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. she would stick to this decision. In the WSJ interview, Ms. Munro said she continues to have ideas about stories amid an internal debate over what to do with them.
“Every day I have mixed messages to myself over whether I will retire,” Ms. Munro added. “I have promised to retire but now and then I get an idea.”
Because she is suffering from a flu, Ms. Munro sent answers dictated to her daughter to questions submitted by The Wall Street Journal.

The author said she will not allow her work to be published posthumously. Asked what she will do with any unfinished or unpublished work, the 82-year old said: “destroy them.”
The daughter, Jenny Munro, said her mother is too frail to travel to Sweden for the Nobel prize-giving ceremony in December. Jenny Munro said that as the writer gets older her memory is starting to suffer. In recent years Ms. Munro, whose stories have sometimes looked at the effects of aging, memory loss and illness, has also recovered from cancer and a heart condition.

Ms. Munro joked that being ill, unless it is severe, can be a bonus. “Because you can just lie around and think, and you can get ideas that way,” she said, in the email sent from her daughter.
But the writer, whose stories often cover the revelations and meanings of childhood events as seen in later life, added that as a person ages they also discover more about how others behave. “Because you understand more,” she said.

The Swedish Academy said it picked Ms. Munro because she is the “master of the contemporary short story” and described her as a “fantastic portrayer of human beings.” Ms. Munro’s dozen-plus collections of short stories have been mainly set around the rural southwestern Ontario region of Canada where she grew up and still lives. Typically, the stories chart the struggles and moral conflicts of everyday characters, particularly women, and the complexities of broken relationships between the sexes. Her stories, some of which take up to a year to write, often unfold over decades, shifting back and forth in time.
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