Korb has a master's degree in English literature and creative writing and has written for a wide variety of educational publishers. In the following essay, she discusses how the narrator of "Boys and Girls" unwittingly accepts being a girl.

Although Alice Munro knew from the time she was 12 years old that she wanted to be a writer, her first collection of short stories was not published until 1968, when Munro was well into her adulthood. Since then, however, she has remained one of Canada's top authors, and her work has crossed the world's boundaries; her writing has been translated into 14 languages and her works are widely anthologized. Her writing often features the world she knows best, the Depression-era southwestern Ontario of her early years. In Dance of the Happy Shades, from which the story "Boys and Girls" is taken, Munro presents the hardscrabble childhood of her youth. Critics...