Western University pauses Alice Munro Chair in Creativity program amid reckoning

LONDON, Ont. — Alice Munro’s alma mater has paused the endowed chair program that bears her name over revelations the writer protected her husband after learning he had sexually abused her daughter.

Western University said Andrea Robin Skinner had the school’s “unwavering support” after coming forward about her stepfather’s abuse and mother’s silence.

“At this time, we are pausing the Chair appointment as we carefully consider Munro’s legacy and her ties to Western,” said a short statement posted on its website Friday.

Ileana Paul, Western’s acting dean of arts and humanities, said in an email that author Sheila Heti’s term as the Alice Munro Chair in Creativity ended in April and that the program pause means the Alice Munro seminar course will not be offered this fall.

A representative for Heti did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The university introduced the program in 2018, saying the chair would lead the “creative culture” in the faculty of arts and humanities.

Plans for its creation date back to 2014, a year after Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature — the first and so far only Canadian to receive the honour.

Skinner, Munro’s youngest daughter, wrote in a first-person essay published in the Toronto Star that she hoped her story would be added to her mother’s legacy. Munro died in May at age 92.

Skinner said the abuse began when she was visiting her mother and stepfather for the summer when she was nine years old, and continued until she reached adolescence.

Her father Jim Munro — himself a prominent member of the literary community as the co-founder of Munro’s Books in Victoria — learned of the abuse soon after it began, but chose not to tell his ex-wife, Skinner wrote.

Skinner told Alice Munro more than a decade later, and the writer ultimately chose to stay with her husband. The relationship between mother and daughter fractured years later.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 12, 2024.

Nicole Thompson, The Canadian Press