S7 Ep. 35: Remembering Alice Munro: Jonny Diamond on His Mother and the Great Canadian Writer

fiction/non/fiction

Editor and writer Jonny Diamond joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about Nobel Prize-winning short story writer Alice Munro, who passed away May 13 in the same Canadian town where Diamond’s mother died 12 years earlier. He outlines what made the lives of the two women similar—namely, marrying young and starting families within the parameters of 1950s expectations, and then finding their own voices after divorcing in the 1970s—and discusses how beautifully Munro wrote about the interiority of those who lived that life or an adjacent life. He reads from his Literary Hub essay, “My Mother Will Live Forever in the Stories of Alice Munro.”

To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/

This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

Jonny Diamond

• “My Mother Will Live Forever in the Stories of Alice Munro” | Literary Hub

Others:

• Fiction/Non/Fiction: Season 1, Episode 19: “Podcasting Pro-Tips and Jonny Diamond on Creating Lit Hub Radio”
• Fiction/Non/Fiction: Season 7, Episode 32: “Claire Messud on Blurring Family History and Fiction”
• Alice Munro
• Margaret Atwood
• Margaret Laurence
• Carol Shields
• James Baldwin
• John Keats
• Walt Whitman
• Simone de Beauvoir
• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
• “Inside Alice Munro’s Notebooks” by Benjamin Hedin | Paris Review
• “Wood” by Alice Munro | The New Yorker | November 16, 1980

“Kindling The Creative Fire: Alice Munro's Two Versions of ‘Wood'" by Lisa Dickler Awano | New Haven Review | May 30, 2012

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