‘That is my torment’: The provenance of ‘Bardon Bus’

Drawing upon the papers in the Alice Munro Fonds at the University of Calgary, this article examines the story ‘Bardon Bus’ (1982) as a synecdoche of Munro’s development at a crucial juncture in her career. While the Calgary archives reveal a great deal about Munro’s methods, ‘Bardon Bus’ is a particular crux in that a full typescript draft of the story, written after the version published in The Moons of Jupiter (1982), exists there. By focusing closely on the materiality of the archival holdings available, this article defines Munro’s compositional methods in relation to the published story, further revealing her growing artistry at a critical moment.