When Professor of Canadian Studies and Associate Dean of Academic Advising Robert Thacker finds something he’s passionate about, he follows it all the way through.
 
That’s what he did when he discovered Canadian writer Alice Munro.
 
Thacker first read Munro in 1973, when he received his first issue of Tamarack Review, a journal committed to new Canadian writing.  “I read her story ‘Material’ and thought, well if this is Canadian literature, sign me up,” he says. “I thought she was really good.”
 
Thacker’s master’s thesis was on Munro and her narrative technique.  He looked at her earlier stories and the story collection Dance of the Happy Shades, which was published in 1968.
 
At the University of Manitoba for his doctoral research, his interest in Munro continued.  “I pursued her as a critic,” he says; he would follow and research her work for the next 30 years.  In the early 1990s, he decided to write her biography.  “Her career demonstrated that she deserved that kind of treatment,” he says.
 
Thacker approached Douglas Gibson, her publisher, and Virginia Barber, her agent, to encourage Munro to cooperate with Thacker on the biography.  “Munro realized that she would be better off if she knew what facts were being presented,” Thacker says.  She agreed to cooperate with him.
 
In 2003, Thacker was appointed a Molson Research Fellow at St. Lawrence. “It was a rare opportunity for me,” he says.  “The fellowship helped me tremendously.”  He spent the next year on sabbatical at the University of Calgary, reading everything in Munro’s archive, and then months in his basement writing the book, Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives.    
 
“Munro’s reputation has done nothing but grow,” he says.  “The reviews of her work have been amazing.  Some have argued her writing is the best in North America.”
 
The book came out late in 2005.  A 2011 updated and expanded edition has been published in paperback by Emblem Editions, and is available now in the United States. “It’s as factual as I could manage,” he says.  “I looked at the files of her publishers, other publishers, other people who had association with her, childhood friends, editors and others.”