Robert McBryde Author: Alice Munro, CBC radio, literary non-fiction, vignettes and sketches, immigrant experience, living in Quebec and in France, childhood and animal stories, creative memoirs, satire, autobiography, family relations, raising children, aging, travel, social commentary, love and marriage, driving lessons, self-deprecation, Dijon France, condiments, translation: English-French; French-English
Publisher’s Note: Funny, manic, and wistful… self-deprecating creative nonfiction…The author, Robert McBryde, a professional translator, has been compared to David Sedaris for the sometimes-snarky autobiographical satire characterizing his literary sketches. Many of the stories in his new book, titled My Time with You Has Been Short but Very Funny, have been featured on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio network.
Author’s Note:
I’ve written a new book of creative non-fiction titled My Time with You Has Been Short but Very Funny, recently published and now on the market. The book is based on stories that I told over the years as a writer/ broadcaster and host on CBC radio based in Quebec City, Canada.
The book is available via my website. The purchase links are at the bottom of the home page.
Apparently the Indigo platform has not yet been activated.
I will post two blogs per week, normally Wednesday and Friday afternoons at around 4:30 p.m. (Eastern Time). Stay tuned!
In upcoming postings, I’ll talk about writers and artists who have powerfully impacted my soon-to-be-extinguished life.
The Incomparable Alice Munro
Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories — and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.
– Alice Munro
When I was a college teacher and a CBC radio storyteller, people would constantly ask, “Who’s your favorite writer? Which author has influenced you the most?”
These days, readers are asking the same questions.
And the answer remains the same: Alice Munro.
https://www.cbc.ca/books/90-things-to-know-about-master-short-story-writer-alice-munro-1.4088507
There was a time, in my 20’s, when my life was in shards, spinning out of control like a badly wound top, a time of infidelity, melodrama, darkness, and pain. A time of earnest postures and pursuits that now seem cringeworthy in the extreme.
I began reading Alice Munro’s subtle and complex stories in those halcyon days of the late 1970s and her work served as a beacon, framing and illuminating hopelessly opaque personal muddle. And her stories remain an indispensable lodestone to this day.
Many of Munro’s stories focus on seminal moments that explode like long-concealed ordnance in the minefield of a lifetime. Frequently, these key events take the form of accidents that define one’s future and rearrange one’s past, triggering epiphanies whose truth may recede or evanesce in the fullness of time.
I’m a product of southern Ontario, Munro’s home ground, and the universe she describes in her southwestern Ontario stories is chillingly familiar: a world of repressed sexuality, sinister subtext, unacknowledged aggressions, and corrosive bigotry. A fabric of secrets and lies. The Southern Ontario Gothic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Ontario_Gothic
Alice Munro’s work is often extremely funny. She subscribes to Harold Pinter’s dictum:
Everything is funny; the greatest earnestness is funny; even tragedy is funny. And I think what I try and do in my [writing] is to get this recognizable reality of the absurdity of what we do and how we behave and how we speak.
Do you have a favorite author about whom you’d like to share? Do you know Alice Munro’s work? What Munro stories have impacted you the most?
Let me know in the comments section of my website.
I’ll continue posting regularly on Facebook (Tuesdays and Thursdays, at the very least least) and Wednesday and Friday afternoon via my blog.
You can also purchase My Time with You Has Been Short but Very Funny via the home page of my website.
If you purchase a book, please leave a review!
And if you have comments about any of my posts, I’d love to hear from you. You can contact me via Facebook or my website, and I’ll get back to you asap. That’s a promise!
Happy reading! 😊
Your friend,
Robert
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