Alice Munro Was Bigger than Canada – Here artists are celebrated by virtue of their nationality. Munro showed me I could escape those tropes

**IN HIGH SCHOOL ENGLISH CLASS,** I saw no connection between literature and nation. An author’s place of origin was a trifling bit of biography that rarely seemed relevant to their work: This is Will, he writes plays, his story’s set in Denmark, but he’s from England; this is Margaret, she writes about the horrors of the feminine experience, her novel’s set in dystopian New England, but she’s from Canada. Here’s another Will, who also hails from England. He has a book about a bunch of boys trying to kill one another on an unnamed island in the Pacific. And finally, Franz, from Prague. He writes about the nightmares of bureaucracy, and his fiction isn’t really set anywhere at all.

This model made sense to me: you didn’t have to write about where you came from. I might have been consigned to live in a suburb north of Toronto, but I wasn’t duty bound to set my work there. In fact, nothing seemed like it would kill a piece of fiction faster. This felt like a fair exchange for not getting to live someplace more lively or diverse—that the borders of geography had no bearing on the contents of imagination.