(London) Alice Munro’s alma mater has suspended the chair program that bears her name following revelations that the writer protected her second husband after learning he had sexually assaulted her daughter.
Western University says Andrea Robin Skinner has the institution’s “unwavering support” after she spoke out last weekend about her stepfather’s abuse and her mother’s silence.
“For now, we are suspending the chair program as we carefully consider Mr.me Munro and his ties to Western University,” said a brief statement posted Friday on the university’s website. The university introduced a chair in 2018, saying the chair would lead “creative culture” within the faculty of arts and humanities.
Ileana Paul, interim dean of Western University’s faculty of arts and letters, said in an email that author Sheila Heti’s term as the Alice Munro Chair in Creativity ended in April and the program’s disruption means the Alice Munro Seminar course will not be offered this fall.
A representative of Mme Heti did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The university launched the program in 2018, saying the chair would lead in “creative culture” within the faculty.
Plans for its creation date back to 2014, a year after Mme Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature – the first and, so far, only Canadian woman to receive the honour.
Mme Skinner, M’s youngest daughterme Munro, wrote in a first-person essay published in the Toronto Star that she hoped her story would add to her mother’s legacy.me Munro died in May at the age of 92.
According to Mme Skinner said the abuse began when she visited her mother and stepfather for the summer at age nine and continued until she reached her teens.
Her father and the writer’s first husband, Jim Munro, himself a prominent member of the literary community as co-founder of Munro’s Books in Victoria, learned of the abuse shortly afterward but chose not to tell his ex-wife, M wrote.me Skinner.
More than ten years later, Mme Skinner told Alice Munro about it, who eventually chose to stay with her husband. The mother-daughter relationship broke down a few years later.