Canadian in Munro's writing is the relation of the world (farms, towns, roads, cities) and the earth (the swathe of North America of land, lakes, rivers called Canada). Obsessed with comings and goings, inscriptions and erasures, Munro's writing is particularly Canadian, we submit, by dint of the grating against each other of two fundamental and apparently opposed forces. Her collections of stories attest a conception of geological time upon which is placed a shallow and ephemeral architectural world the traces of which she passionately attempts to secure from their fast-approaching disappearance. Munro tirelessly de-sediments such cryptic enclosures, shakes their secret events out into raw exposure, affirms life's indestructible after-life. Munro's writes environment, yoking Canadian place in the Anthropocene (the era of the human in geological time) with literary space-time in imagination (the epoch of the trace).