Yesterday, 40 MFA students locked Lorrie Moore inside a basement and prodded her with long, pointed questions.

Here's a transcript, lightly abridged by my ADD, of Moore's thoughts and responses.

-Moore says she "may be the only writer constantly discouraged from writing novels. I try not to take it personally." As most of you already know, Moore's currently working on a novel.

-(Before I arrived at the Q & A, I decided that if any student asked about "the autobiographical elements" in "People Like That are The Only People Here," I'd allow myself to glare.) A frizzy-haired girl with an overly loud voice asks about "the autobiographical elements" in "People Like That are The Only People Here." Moore's response makes note of the impersonal titles, instead of names, assigned to the story's characters ("the Mother," "the Husband," "the Baby," "the Surgeon"). That stylistic choice, she goes on to say, was meant to convey something about catastrophe's ability to turn people into "roles," and people's desperate reliance on "domestic scripts." (She slightly rolls script's r. Her pronounciation of words throughout the Q & A feels very prep school posh.)

-At Cornell, where she did her MFA, she never missed a class, and looked down on classmates who "took the weekends off" from writing. (This made my heart, and a couple other organs in close vicinity, sink with Titanic-like finality. I used to feel that way, too, but nowadays only apply discipline to work-avoidance.)

-Someone asks if she's brought anything she's learned from teaching (Moore teaches English at the University of Wisconsin in Madison) to her writing. The only thing teaching really does, Moore says, is pay for groceries. (Her books don't make good money? I'm surprised. Her last was a bestseller.)

-Moore breifly discusses the benefits of setting work aside for a month or two and then coming back to it with fresh eyes. She also mentions how much she can't stand reading her first two collections, though she recently opened up Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and loved it. "Can I still write this well?" she asked herself -- and then, "Should I have just written little novels" about teenage girls my whole career? (Readers who agree with me that, compared to her story collections, Frog Hospital is shit, might wonder if this undermines her claim that time gives her self-assessments more objectivity.)

-She thinks a writer's last novels tend to never be his best. She thinks Philip Roth's most recent books are lousy.

(-Observation: when students ask her about particular quotes from interviews, she never remembers having said them. We know her interviews much better than she does.)

-Moore's asked how it feels to be so widely copied. (Many girls give nervous smiles.) "I don't know anything about that," Moore responds.

-Moore talks about a writer's need to find "their voice." She's heard that other teachers assign excercises requiring students to imitate famous writers, but she's unsure those excercises are helpful. Ethan Canin, the Q & A moderator, mentions that when he was younger, he liked to type out passages from favorite novels, and that, in the olden days, this was common practice for beginning writers. Moore mentions that she recently had to retype some paragraphs by Updike for use as quotes in a review. She really enjoyed that, particularly because she was getting paid by the word.

-She's asked who she reads. "I read everybody," she says. She's asked again. She reads everybody, except for authors in translation. Having had her own work translated, she suspects that translations are often unfaithful to authorial intent. (To be honest, people's reluctance to read translations annoys me. I explained why here [scroll down to part II].)

-Moore says she reads very slowly, and thinks most writers do. (Ethan -- whose questions have so far been responded to by Moore with bewildered "No"s or "Next question?" -- is very happy to add, I read slowly, too.)

-Moore's asked about her similes and metaphors by a classmate who once gave a good speech in class on Moore's similes and metaphors. How do they function in her work? What is she trying to accomplish by using them? "I don't think about that," Moore answers.

-Prodded further, Moore says that her similes help "register voice and rhythm," and probably point to the "inadequacy of the original description."

-Moore talks about her similes some more. Some that seem normal or obvious to her have seemed "dangerously odd" to others. She recalls that, in her first New Yorker story, a line -- something like Alarm buzzed through her like a low-level tea. -- got cut by an editor who didn't think it made much sense. But, by the time the story was set to reappear in a collection. she'd reincluded it. (Back home, I found the line on p.85 of Like Life. From "You're Ugly, Too": "Alarm buzzed through her, mildy, like a tea.")

-She almost always has a story's ending in mind before starting it. Then, one-third into the story, the ending becomes clearer, and she skips ahead and writes it.

-A student asks how she goes about assigning characters their jobs, "something poets don't need to think about." It's a "real weakness for me," Moore says. She keeps on accidentally letting characters work at historical societies.

-Moore describes the process of writing a short story: First comes "some idea"; then, "things fall in from the world" -- things that have "correspondence" to that first idea; and eventually, there's a moment when the story "closes" shut and becomes a "hot house … of a fictional world."

-She's asked about motherhood's effects on her writing. "For my writing, it's been terrible. For my life," she pauses, and then says flatly, "good."

-On the other hand, she says that "Marriage is very good for writing. Most writers are married … it cuts the solitude of writing." She continues, "The trick [for writers] is not to be too busy or too lonely … Solitude, with company built into it — that's the best thing."

-The Q & A's last question brings up the title story in Like Life. Why was that the title story? Actually, Moore says, she wanted to name the book after the story "Vissi d'Arte," but the people in marketing didn't like foreign words. And, though "Like Life" won the title slot, she believes it's "the most failed story in the collection. It wasn't what I wanted it to be at all." (I want to write, Like Life?)

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Snagged from the University of Central Florida's website, Lorrie Moore and T-shirt Simulacra:

Official Caption: "English Department with Lorrie Moore." And, somehow, the moment seems ripe for a Lorrie Moore short story.

Posted by nchicha at April 3, 2004 09:39 PM