Alice Munro followed the back roads of stories, mapping routes home to southwestern Ontario

Alice Munro, who died at the age of 92, was a storyteller devoted to representing the rich complexity of human experience, often through her nuanced exploration of southwestern Ontario history and culture.

As the 2013 Nobel Prize presentation honouring her as “the master of the contemporary short story,” put it: “It may seem like a paradox, but it is actually quite logical: what we call world literature is generally rooted in the local and individual.”

So strong are the associations between Munro and her origins in southwestern Ontario that for some, the area around Huron County came to be known as “Alice Munro Country.” As Dennis Duffy recognizes in the 2010 book National Plots: Historical Fiction and Changing Ideas of Canada, this is not just a geographical space, but a “country of mind” that developed in the writing of Munro, and also in southwestern Ontario-based contemporaries of Munro’s in the 1970s like painters Greg Curnoe and Jack Chambers and playwright James Reaney.

In my research, I am interested in how the complexity of Munro’s view of the area and Canadian writers today invite us to expand our awareness to other histories that her writing only indirectly registers and does not fully take into account. This allows for an enriched view of Canadian literature and...

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