My friend David, who is Canadian, sent me this bit from Philip Marchand's review of Alice Munro's most recent story collection, Too Much Happiness:

If Alice Munro had never existed, part of the soul of Canada would have remained inarticulate, forgotten, submerged.  The locus of this Canadian scene rendered so powerfully in her fiction is rural Southwestern Ontario, settled by Scotch Presbyterians, Congregationalists and Methodists from the north of England. . . . But everything in her world comes back to that small-town milieu of pokey little stores, dull Sunday-afternoon dinners with aunts and uncles, a mentality made up of respect for hard work, resentment of show-offs and dim memories of Calvinist terrors.

Alice Munro may be my favorite contemporary writer, and I think that Marchand cogently sums up why she is so important to writers such as myself. We live unremarkable lives in what seem to be dull and unremarkable places among what seem to be dull and unremarkable people. Yet whether we like it or not, this milieu is our subject, and one that requires our moral honesty, not scorn or cynicism or sentimentality or wishful thinking. We have a responsibility to it; and as writers, our responsibility requires articulation. I may have small hope of writing as well as Alice Munro, but that doesn't let me off the hook. If I don't write about Harmony, Maine, who will?