Lorrie Moore

Audio

Transcript

Ramona Koval: Lorrie Moore, welcome to The Book Show.

Lorrie Moore: Hi, Ramona, it's nice to be here.

Ramona Koval: Well from the bottom of the world we greet you, and the first question is, what does it mean to come from a farm in the mid-west of America?

Lorrie Moore: Well, what does it mean? It can mean many things. I think for this character, she's the daughter of a kind of transplanted boutique farmer, so he's not really of the farming community in a profound and generational or entrenched way. So he himself is considered as a kind of visitor to this calling, but he has made himself into a farmer because he has wanted to. So he's a kind of a hobby farmer and she's the daughter of a hobby farmer.

Ramona Koval: But the mid-west of America, what does that conjour up in American eyes?

Lorrie Moore: Oh, what does it mean? Well, it's the breadbasket of course of the country, and perhaps of the world. It's where food comes from. It also is...you know, many people think of it as a kind of land-locked place that exists between two coasts and you fly over it and kind of ignore it on your way between New York and LA. But it's much more complicated than that, and the college towns here in the mid-west, especially the one where I am now, in Madison, are rather cosmopolitan and international and complex and diverse. And I wanted to get some of that down as well as the small-town farming community details.

Ramona Koval: well I think the best way to introduce us to this book is for you to read from the very beginning, so Lorrie Moore will you read us the beginning of A Gate at the Stairs?

Lorrie Moore: Certainly. [reads from The cold came late that fall, and the songbirds were caught off guard...to ...a goat will not really consume a tin can. A goat just liked to lick the paste on the label. But no-one ever asked me that.]

Ramona Koval: Lorrie Moore, reading from the very beginning of A Gate at the Stairs. Well it's true that birds look stricken, don't they...why do they look like that? Is it because the beak isn't really a kind of smiley face. How could we ever see if they were happy?

Lorrie Moore: Well I think they probably are stricken. If you had to live the life of a bird you'd probably look like a bird. It just probably comes about from the lifestyle. But it's the small, worried eyes, and the slightly mask-like expression on a bird that I think makes them look stricken.

Ramona Koval: You're a big noticer, aren't you?

Lorrie Moore: I guess I am. I think I always have been, but I think that's what all writers have in common. And if they don't have that in common, if they don't notice things, they just make things up as if they have noticed them.

Ramona Koval: And the Columbian tribe in cultural anthropology?

Lorrie Moore: that is based on something that I did read somewhere. So it's not completely fabricated. there is a Columbian tribe that did have this practice of keeping a child in a cave and then at the age of six or seven would bring the child out and then the child would become like this bedazzled creature and they would make that child the priest of their tribe.

Ramona Koval: So it doesn't really matter whether it's true or not, though, does it? Or does it?

Lorrie Moore: In a novel?

Ramona Koval: Yes.

Lorrie Moore: Well I don't know. That's a question readers and writers often have. If you start to draw things into a novel that seem to refer to worlds that do exist outside the novel, should they be factual or should they not? I mean you can have that argument. There's a little bit of both, I think, in novels. People are making up facts and also using actual ones to support and help illustrate a fictional story.

Ramona Koval: There's a discussion early on in the book about the kind of language that goes on in this small-town lingo. Things like: 'Sounds good. It was the mid-western girl's reply to everything.' So when Tassie is presented with a subject or a something to agree with, she says, 'Oh, sounds good.' she doesn't really know if it is good, but if it sounds good that's what she says. Or there's something called the hypothetical conditional past: 'I'd been gunna do that.' Tell me about this idea of the hypothetical conditional past. Is it a sort of way of not committing oneself to something?

Lorrie Moore: It's just a fluke of regional speech, I think. and it's not everywhere around here but it can be heard. That particular hypothetical past...I just made that term up to describe it, but you will hear sometimes people in this neck of the woods using a tense that seems not to exist in any other language whatsoever. The 'sounds good' you will hear everywhere, even outside of the mid-west. But when I first came here it seemed really, really prevalent. It wasn't something I heard in New York. It just seemed to be automatic among clerks, among young people, among anyone who's sort of winding up the conversation, bringing it to a close. And they bring it to a close by saying 'sounds good.' And I thought this is very, very mid-western; I don't hear this elsewhere.

Ramona Koval: But what does it mean, though, to speak like that? Does it mean that I need to have you think you're agreeing with me but actually I may not agree with you and I might do what I like later on when you can't see me any more?

Lorrie Moore: Exactly. It's just a kind of papering over with a bland, seemingly pleasant remark that's non-committal and just moves the subject along, and moves the action of two people in a conversation along. And it's a kind of conversational exchange that happens all the time. You don't have that in Australia, I take it.

Ramona Koval: Oh, I think we probably do, but...

Lorrie Moore: Sounds good? Yeah?

Ramona Koval: Well I'm just interested in where it comes from in the regions, and why, why it arises.

Lorrie Moore: I think it's a desire to have things be smooth that might not be smooth. It's a desire for things to be pleasant that if examined more closely wouldn't be. But it's just...and often it's in lieu of 'thank you' or 'see you later', you know, whatever. And it has a slight kind of false observation to it: sounds good. Or a slight kind of faux praise to it, 'sounds good.' It's seemingly offering something to the listener that it actually isn't.

Ramona Koval: Lots of people in this book—and you too, obviously—are entranced with language: how things are expressed, how things sound like they might rhyme with other things. How sayings can be evoked. There's a great joy in language in this book.

Lorrie Moore: Yes, I think that's what a 20-year-old would be paying attention to a lot in terms of coming to a college town and listening to how people speak. But I also think it's more widespread than that. I do think that we do pay attention to little quirks and homonyms I think in our speech and little misunderstandings that are then comical. But certainly a 20-year-old who's coming to college and is feeling a little bit like a fish out of water would be noticing all of that.

Ramona Koval: She's looking at a magazine and she's looking at the cover...I think it says, 'Four things men find hot...I could never find all four and they were never listed numerically or in a conspicuous place.' I think anybody who's ever looked at those magazines will agree with that. And when she reads—the person she eventually starts to work for has a restaurant, and when she reads a reference to 'hand-raked Norman sea salt' she says something like, 'So this is what Americans were busying themselves with in Normandy now it had been liberated from the Nazis— hand-raking the sea salt. Look D-Day in the eye and tell it that.'

I mean she's got a great sense of humour, this kid. But she turns up for this job and she's with these people who decide that they want a nanny for their as yet un-adopted baby, and she's sort of schlepped along to meet all these possible women who are going to give up their babies to them. And it doesn't occur to her that this is a weird setup, that these people are weird.

Lorrie Moore: I think that she does wonder about it, why she's being brought along. But of course she's being brought along as a useful...just as a piece of helpfulness to me, the author. I need her as the narrator to be in those situations where she might not ordinarily be. But it does underscore also the woman she's working for, it underscores her isolation and slight dislocation from her own husband. Does it make sense that the nanny that they've hired would be at these meetings? Well, it's a little stretch in order that we can be with Tassie as she observes things that she might not ordinarily be privy to. But she's cooperating with me as a narrative device.

Ramona Koval: But she's also...I'm not going to give away what happens in the book, because it is too compelling and it's too heart-in-one's-mouth, and I wouldn't spoil that for listeners, but it actually does make sense for the story, that she be there. But she's just this 20-year-old who just doesn't pick up all of these cues, does she? She's got this boyfriend who seems to be a Brazilian, but she doesn't really find out too much about him, and he turns out not to be a Brazilian. She's got all of these things happen, which is actually not what she expects, and she asks herself, what is going on here, what am I supposed to do, and you know being 20, you don't really know what you're supposed to do, do you?

Lorrie Moore: Well no. And she's being put into situations that are a little unusual even for anyone, so she's having quite a year. She will never have a year this tumultuous again, I hope. But she does, for purposes of this novel. I think the fact that you could be involved with someone, if you're 20, involved with someone who is speaking Spanish at you and calling it Portuguese. If you've studied French at high school and you don't know Spanish, I think you might be fooled a little bit. But she doesn't discover that until later.

Ramona Koval: She's a young woman who's surrounded by music. She picks up the guitar, she's enrolled in these very weird subjects at university. What are we saying here about the kinds of education she's getting? I mean the subjects she's going for, she's going for film music of war movies, she's going for sort of Sufi for beginners. She's going for a wine-tasting class—what sort of an education is she going to get from this?

Lorrie Moore: Well I think she's signing up for some soft courses because she knows that she's going to be also working, so her time is going to be stretched. But these are courses that are actually taught at various universities. The soundtracks course is taught at Northwestern, in Evanston...

Ramona Koval: Seriously?

Lorrie Moore: Seriously. The wine-tasting course, I know someone who took it two years ago, and the wine-tasting course is taught at Cornell. Sufism I'm sure it's taught. There's a kind of course here that's taught as part of Islamic studies that includes Sufism. The geology course is still a geology course but it seems to have a fluffy title because it's called 'Dating Rocks' but her dad makes a joke about that. But that would be a somewhat serious geology course. It all sounds pretty goofy, but it does come out of American academe.

Ramona Koval: And of course anyone who knows a 20-year-old knows that what they do towards the end of the year is try to write the same essay for all the different subjects. So she's trying to combine the work of several classes like 'Sufic Mrs Miniver' is an essay she's kind of trying to apply to both of those courses. Or 'The Plausible Sufic Geology of Stonehenge'. You must have a lot of fun observing these students over the years that come in and out of your classrooms.

Lorrie Moore: Well, you know this character is not based on my observations of my students, except to the extent that I know how smart those kids are. And some people have said to me, this young woman, at 20 (because she's narrating from some distance, she's narrating from her late 20s and looking back at the year she was 20 in 2002) but people have said, 'Oh, she's too smart, she's beyond her years.' And I keep saying, 'Oh, you have no idea how smart 20-year-olds are. They're so much smarter than anyone else on the planet, really.' But most of their keen intelligence is kept inside, and as a writing teacher I get to see some of this coming out in their work, so I know how bright these young adults in their 20s are. And so to that extent I felt I had information and solid ground to sort of fashion Tassie Keltjin from.

Ramona Koval: What kind of a teacher are you?

Lorrie Moore: Oh...I'm very ad hoc. But I teach creative writing, so it's one of those classes where you get to talk about dangling participles and punctuation and how people kiss. You know, you get to talk about all kinds of things. You get to talk about the nitty gritty experiences of human existence, and then you also get to talk about how you actually write a sentence and how you make it work.

Ramona Koval: Do you want to talk about that these days?

Lorrie Moore: As opposed to...

Ramona Koval: As opposed to just being a writer and not having to work at the university. And not having to explain that to anybody. Because you've got stuff to do for yourself.

Lorrie Moore: Well one always feels a little bit of that. But it's also nice to get out of the house and have contact with bright young people—who have a lot to teach you as well. As I get older I realise I'm, you know, I'm out of touch with contemporary music except through my students. I'm out of touch with a lot of things that they put me back in touch with. So...

Ramona Koval: So would you do it even if you didn't think you needed to?

Lorrie Moore: Would I do it if I won the lottery, you mean?

Ramona Koval: Yes.

Lorrie Moore: I would do a little of it. I would do less of it, but I would still do it.

Ramona Koval: Do you have a sort of philosophy of teaching, do you think that these students turn up as born writers that you have to liberate? Or do you think that you can kind of fashion one from what you get at the beginning?

Lorrie Moore: No. You can't, and every writing teacher knows that. But what you can do is you can be an editor, you can be a coach, and sometimes you can put them in contact with really beautiful stories that they've never read before, you know, published stories by Alice Munro or Flannery O'Connor, and you can suddenly watch their talent ignite or their energy ignite, and they can come in and write in a way that they couldn't when they first started the class. Sometimes things happen: you see someone who didn't seem very promising in September turn in something in December that's wonderful, because something happened, you know, they read and they got excited and their talent was unleashed. That's the best you can hope for.

Beyond that you're also teaching composition, you're teaching them, you know, here's where the semi-colons go, here's what a subordinate clause is. Things like that.

Ramona Koval: And what about you, did you have a driving feeling that you wanted to be a writer when you were their age? I know you won a short-story competition, didn't you?

Lorrie Moore: When I was 19 I did, yes. And well, I wanted to write. I loved to write when I was in college. I didn't know how one could put it together and actually become a writer. I didn't know what that meant. And it's been decades of improvisation since then, you know, just trying to figure out how to do that. But I'm in my 50s now and I'm still doing it, so somehow the improvisation is working well enough. Not perfectly, but well enough.

Ramona Koval: Did you have somebody, like you, to help you along?

Lorrie Moore: I had teachers who were very encouraging, and without that encouragement I think I might have fallen by the wayside, I'm sure.

Ramona Koval: And what bout the writing life, is that something you'd recommend?

Lorrie Moore: The writing life, which is sitting at the desk and writing stories? Well you know if that's what you love to do it's going to make you completely happy to do it. There are other aspects: seeing something come out and selecting the book jacket cover...I don't know, there are other aspects to it that you're unprepared for, and that can seem to have nothing to do with the writing life. The writing life is actually just sitting at your desk and investigating your imagining of a story and getting it down in language that you choose carefully, and sometimes painfully.

Ramona Koval: Well, it may have been painful for you, but it's a great pleasure for the readers, so thank you very much, Lorrie Moore, for being on The Book Show today.

Lorrie Moore: Thank you for having me.

Ramona Koval: And Lorrie Moore's novel is called A Gate at the Stairs and it's published by Alfred A Knopf.

Publications

Title: A Gate At The Stairs

Author: Lorrie Moore

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf