>> Kevin Larimer:
Hello, everyone. My name is Kevin Larimer. I am the editor in chief of
Poets and Writers Magazine and I am delighted to
be here with you all. I want to thank the
Library of Congress for bring us all together
to celebrate books and the authors who write them. At Poets and Writers, I've
devoted the last 19 years to doing exactly that, so I'm
especially happy to be here on this stage in the
country's capital. I'd also like to acknowledge the
national endowment for the arts for sponsoring this specific
event, and I'm honored to be joined here today by two of the country's
brightest literary minds, Lorrie Moore and Richard Russo. So I'm going to offer a sort
of brief introduction for both of them just to remind us all of
their amazing accomplishments, and then we will talk for a
bit about writing and reading and books, and then we will
pause for ten or 15 minutes of questions from the audience,
so certainly, you know, be thinking about what you'd like to ask these
esteemed authors here. >> Lorrie Moore: And
how about the lights? >> Kevin Larimer: The lights? >> Lorrie Moore: Can we
ask about the lights? >> Kevin Larimer: I'm being
asked if the lights could come down just a little bit. We're kind of a little -- >> Lorrie Moore:
Blinded by the light. >> Richard Russo: Yeah. >> Kevin Larimer:
Blinded is the word. >> Lorrie Moore: That's a great
song, blinded by the light. >> Richard Russo: I feel
like I'm about to be beaten with a rubber hose, actually. >> Kevin Larimer: I don't
know if it's possible to -- >> Lorrie Moore:
It might not be. >> Kevin Larimer: --
lower those a little bit. Okay. >> Lorrie Moore: They're
not listening to us. >> Kevin Larimer: Okay,
well, hopefully they'll -- >> Lorrie Moore: Oh, well. >> Kevin Larimer:
-- dim as we go. Okay. So Lorrie Moore is the
Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt professor of English at
Vanderbilt University. She is the recipient of the
Irish Times International Prize for Literature, a Lannan
Foundation fellowship, and a National Endowment for
the Arts fellowship as well as the PEN/Malamud
Award and the Rea Award for her achievement
in the short story. Moore has written five story
collections, including Birds of America and most recently,
Bark, and three novels, including Gate at the Stairs. Her new book is See What Can
Be Done: Essays, Criticism, and Commentary, published
earlier this year by Knopf. Richard Russo's novels
included Everybody's Fool and That Old Cape Magic. In 2002, he was awarded the
Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for Empire Falls,
which was adapted into a award-winning
miniseries by HBO. He's also published
story collections, most recently Trajectory
in 2017. His new book of essays
is The Destiny Thief: Essays on Writing,
Writers, and Life, published earlier this
year again by Knopf. How about a round of applause
for our esteemed author? [ Applause ] Okay, so I have to say I had
to chuckle just a little bit when I discovered the
title for the conversation that we're supposed to
be having, which is -- >> Lorrie Moore: You
chuckled, we cried. We wept. >> Kevin Larimer: But the
title here is How Writers Think and Work. >> Lorrie Moore: Yeah. I passed out briefly. >> Kevin Larimer: So we have about 45 minutes
left, so Richard -- >> Richard Russo: They
rejected the If Writers Think and just went to, yeah. >> Kevin Larimer: So how do
you think, Richard, you know? >> Richard Russo: What's that? >> Lorrie Moore:
And if writers work. >> Kevin Larimer:
How do you think? No, just kidding. >> Richard Russo: Yeah. >> Kevin Larimer: Okay, so. >> Richard Russo: Slowly. >> Kevin Larimer: I've
been reading, you know, the two new books, and
they're both fantastic reads. If you guys haven't picked
them up, I really recommend it. It's like sitting
down and talking shop with two real masters
of the craft, so thank you for these books. They're great, and it's been
really interesting to read them in preparation for this evening because there are some
really interesting points of intersection. For example, humor. Okay, so Richard, in a
chapter titled The Gravestone and the Commode in
your book, you write -- I know, it's a great
chapter title -- "Because humor looks easy, people want to know
how it's done. My writing students used to ask, 'How do you make
things so funny?' to which I usually replied,
'I don't make anything funny. I'm simply reporting the world
as I find it.'" And you know, earlier this week, I was
actually in Tennessee and southwestern Virginia for
work, and I was eating dinner at a diner, and I was the only
one there who was eating alone, and I was the only one eating
alone while reading a book, and I was the only one
reading alone, reading a book, and laughing out loud to myself. It was your story
collection, Bark. >> Lorrie Moore: Oh. >> Kevin Larimer: And the
first story in that collection, Debarking, I believe
it's called, -- >> Lorrie Moore: Right. >> Kevin Larimer: -- is
just laugh-out-loud funny. They looked at me
like I was crazy. So it's very funny. >> Lorrie Moore: Nobody
came in and shot you. It wasn't a Waffle House. >> Kevin Larimer: No. >> Lorrie Moore: Okay. >> Kevin Larimer: It was
not a Waffle House, no. >> Lorrie Moore: All right. >> Kevin Larimer: But you know,
you've both been rightly praised for the humor in your fiction,
and I won't ask how either of you do it, you
know, to your point, but I would like to know
whether you can sort of identify anything in your
life that has made you able, you know, as Richard writes
to, you know, report the world as you find it in this way. You know, was humor valued in your family during your early
life in a way that sort of kind of programmed you to see
the world in this way? >> Richard Russo: Why are you
looking -- you're looking at me? >> Lorrie Moore: Yeah. >> Richard Russo:
Should I start? >> Lorrie Moore: You begin. You begin. We're both from upstate
New York. >> Richard Russo: Yeah. >> Lorrie Moore: So clearly,
it's in the water up there. >> Richard Russo:
That's what it is. That's it. >> Lorrie Moore: That's it. >> Richard Russo: We can
leave it right there. If you're from upstate New
York, you got a chance. >> Lorrie Moore: It's in
the Hudson River valley. >> Richard Russo: I think I
discovered my voice as a kind of comic writer when I
began actually to look at my father differently,
because my parents separated when I was a kid in
small-town upstate New York. I didn't know anybody else
whose parents had separated. My parents hadn't divorced yet,
but I was living with my parents and my maternal grandparents, and they were all
wonderful, wonderful people. I wouldn't have said necessarily that humor was their
strong suit, but they were wonderful
people, and I owe them more than I could ever express, but
because I was living, I think, with them, who my father was and what his story was wasn't
immediately apparent to me when I was growing up, and I
only really kind of met him when I was -- I don't know. I mean he was always around
on the periphery of my life, but he wasn't really part of
my life until I was a teenager, and it was only then that
I began to process the fact that he was really funny. He was a wonderful storyteller,
just a magnificent bullshitter, and for any of you who
have read the two novels that Donald Sullivan
is in, Sully, those two books were
based on my father. I took wide, deep liberties, but he was a magnificent
storyteller, and I used to listen
to him tell stories because he was a little bit
like Mark Twain, in the sense that he used every
single audience, you know. He paid attention to
when people laughed and when their attention
began to drift away. >> Lorrie Moore: And
he fine-tuned it. >> Richard Russo: Yeah. >> Lorrie Moore: Yeah. >> Richard Russo:
And the next time -- and it was always from
one bar to another that we were going to, usually
on the way home from work, and I began to understand,
and a lot of the guys, a lot of the guys
that he worked with, all road construction workers,
they were all funny, too. They lived hard lives,
but they were all funny, funny guys, and I would listen. I would watch my father tell
stories, and he was so -- and he was so funny,
and he got funnier, and always the best thing about
him was that there was a -- usually after he'd told
the story about 20 times and he'd really,
really fine-tuned it, then the next day, he
would tell it to me, having completely forgotten
that I was there, you know. And so what happened to me at
some point was that I began to have, I think,
my own, and I was -- now we're fast-forwarding
probably to almost the age of 30 and when I'd been trying
to be a writer for a while, and we finally -- and I finally
got to the point where it began to dawn on me that
all of that stuff -- that I'd been listening
to my father tell stories, his mannerisms, his
vocal mannerisms, also the way he revised, the way
he paid attention to audience -- that all of that was stuff
that I could actually use, and I'd been completely
ignoring it, as if it were absolutely
valueless. So that was a turning -- that
was a turning point for me. I really wanted to
be a serious writer. I take comedy seriously, but I
wanted to be a "serious" writer, and it was when I began to
understand what my father was -- what my father had to offer me
and my life, not just as his son but as a writer, that some
of that began to crystallize. >> Kevin Larimer: How
about you, Lorrie? Did you have something
in your -- >> Lorrie Moore: You know,
I think everyone I knew from the beginning
of my life was funny. My father, too, was very
funny and would tell -- he was also a great storyteller. I was never a great storyteller,
but I paid attention to how he told jokes, how
he told funny stories, and I told -- and I
paid attention to how -- -- everyone at a gathering, just
like if you're getting together with friends for drinks,
if you're getting together with your family for dinner, everyone around the table
is funny at least once, at least once, and then
if you pay attention to what makes it funny,
then you start to sort of understand comedy a
little more and understand it as the grammar of
conversation -- >> Kevin Larimer: Right. >> Lorrie Moore:
-- and socializing. >> Kevin Larimer: Right. >> Lorrie Moore: No one gets
together not to have a laugh. Everyone gets together
to have a laugh, and there's nothing funnier
than a memorial service, right? >> Richard Russo: Absolutely. >> Lorrie Moore: It's totally a
cross between standup and death. >> Richard Russo: Yeah, yes. >> Lorrie Moore:
It's really crazy. >> Richard Russo: Yeah, and
sometimes standup winning, too, you know, strangely. >> Lorrie Moore: Yeah, yeah, and so comedy's just
there in our DNA. >> Kevin Larimer: Yeah. >> Lorrie Moore: And writers
become alert to it, I think, and want to sort of put it
in there with the tragedy and with the other
things that -- >> Kevin Larimer: Right. >> Lorrie Moore: --
life consists of. >> Kevin Larimer: So it sounds like what you're both saying
is it's sort of a natural way of perceiving things and of
course it's going to show up in your work,
rather than like a tool in your toolbox that -- >> Lorrie Moore: Right. That's what I think. >> Kevin Larimer: --
you're pulling out. >> Lorrie Moore:
That's what I think. >> Kevin Larimer: Yeah. Okay. >> Lorrie Moore: Yeah. >> Richard Russo: Although
it does beg a question of why we don't see
more of it -- >> Kevin Larimer: Right. >> Richard Russo: -- if it's
a tool in everyone's toolbox, and as Lorrie says, and I
completely agree, that no, we don't get together
to have a bad time. We get together to have laughs. We get to -- >> Kevin Larimer: Right. >> Richard Russo: And it is. I love what you said about
being the grammar, the language of how we -- of how
we communicate. It does seem to me curious, given how important
we both believe it is, that there isn't
more of it out there. >> Lorrie Moore: I think
there's a lot of it, though. >> Richard Russo: Yeah. There's a fair amount. >> Lorrie Moore: I think, yeah. I mean someone once asked me
how it was that I used humor, like when did I know
how to use it, and I said I would
never use humor. I mean that would be a mean
thing to do to humor, you know. >> Richard Russo: Yeah. >> Lorrie Moore: Humor is there in the story that
you're telling. You have to sometimes
find humor -- >> Kevin Larimer: Right. >> Lorrie Moore: -- and let it
drift and let it come alive -- >> Kevin Larimer: Right. >> Lorrie Moore:
-- in your text. >> Kevin Larimer: Right. >> Lorrie Moore: But you
shouldn't use it necessarily -- >> Richard Russo: Yeah. >> Lorrie Moore: -- like a tool. >> Richard Russo: Yeah. >> Lorrie Moore: It's
just it's kind of there in your people and
in your world -- >> Richard Russo: Yeah. >> Lorrie Moore: -- and in
your way of looking at things, and as we know also,
humor is a form -- well, the old saying
comedy is tragedy plus time. >> Richard Russo: Yeah, yeah. >> Lorrie Moore: But humor then
obviously means you've survived, so it's an expression
of survival. >> Kevin Larimer: That's great. >> Lorrie Moore: And
that's a nice thing, -- >> Richard Russo: Yeah. >> Lorrie Moore: -- to
express your survival. So no matter what
happens to you, you can make a funny
story of it eventually. >> Kevin Larimer: Right. Well, Richard, to speak to
your question, you know, you mentioned something about,
you know, always wanting to write serious fiction. >> Richard Russo: Yeah. >> Kevin Larimer: And I wonder
if that's something that a lot of people or a lot of writers
might even unconsciously think, that you can't have serious -- it's not serious literature
if it's also funny, which I don't think is true
at all, but I just wonder if there's, you know,
a misperception there. >> Richard Russo: I think for
me, it was almost as much -- it wasn't that I -- when I say
I wanted to be a serious writer, "serious" in quotation
marks, I think more than anything else was that I
wanted to be taken seriously, that is, and that that was --
maybe for me the surest sign of being taken seriously was
becoming a serious writer, and I think that
just has something do with my psychological profile as
a young man more than anything. >> Kevin Larimer: Shifting
gears just a little bit, -- >> Lorrie Moore: Yeah. >> Kevin Larimer: We don't have
to give up on the humor, but -- >> Richard Russo: I never do. >> Lorrie Moore: We're going to
have to give up on these lights. >> Kevin Larimer: I'm sorry. >> Lorrie Moore: I'm going to
put a -- I'm going to have to -- it's going to be like
saluting you all -- >> Richard Russo: Yeah. >> Kevin Larimer: It's a
little -- it's a little bright. >> Lorrie Moore: -- but now
I can see you, but I'll -- >> Kevin Larimer: I know. We can't see -- >> Lorrie Moore: Oh, well. >> Kevin Larimer: -- the people. But in a review of Charles
Baxter's Shadow Play, which is included in
your new collection, -- >> Lorrie Moore: You okay? >> Richard Russo: Yeah. >> Kevin Larimer: -- you write, "Often when short
story writers go to write novels,
they get jaunty. They take deep breaths
and become brazen, the way shy people do on wine,"
which is a very funny line, but you know, you've gone back and forth throughout your
career from, you know, stories to novels and back
again, and I'm just wondering if you could talk a
little bit about the kind of different modes of writing in
both these short and long forms. You know, do you approach
the work differently when you know you're
sitting down with a novel, writing a novel versus a story? >> Lorrie Moore: Yeah. I mean there are writers, and
Alice Munro is apparently one of them, who sometimes begin and they don't know whether
something's a short story or a novel. >> Kevin Larimer: Right. >> Lorrie Moore: And she's
ostensibly always trying to write a novel, and that's
why her stories are so huge and compact and dense
and straddle time, and they're like
little miniature novels. I've never had that issue. >> Kevin Larimer: No? Okay. >> Lorrie Moore: I've always
known that it's either going to be a story or it's
going to be a novel. >> Kevin Larimer: Okay. >> Lorrie Moore: But I mean
I have very few novels. The novel gives you a
chance to really spread out. See, because of the lights, I
can't see what baby this is. >> Richard Russo:
That's all right. >> Kevin Larimer: Maybe
the lights are too bright for the baby. >> Lorrie Moore: The
lights are too bright. I agree. But you know, a novel
obviously offers you just more space, simply. >> Kevin Larimer: Right. >> Lorrie Moore: And so you can
-- and time is often the subject of a novel, and you have
more space to explore time. You can handle time differently. There's some stereophonic
quality always to a novel. You may have a couple
different points of view, or you may have different
points of time, or you're just, you know, carrying
a cast of characters through a longer period of
time, unless it's Ulysses, and that's just a day, but -- >> Richard Russo: Yeah. >> Kevin Larimer: Right. >> Lorrie Moore: But I
actually like writing novels, and I'm working on one
now, but every time I -- the published one,
it gets reviews that say she should go back
to writing short stories. >> Kevin Larimer: Right. >> Lorrie Moore: But I persist. You know, it's just
resilience and stubbornness. >> Kevin Larimer: Do you think
it's because the first book that you had was a
story collection? Is that it? >> Lorrie Moore:
No, I think it's because the first
novel I had was bad, and then people just think
all the other ones are bad, too, but I don't think so. I think the other ones
are better than that. >> Richard Russo: Yeah. >> Lorrie Moore:
So I don't know. >> Kevin Larimer: Okay. Richard, how about you,
because you also have two story collections, but I guess
I would argue to say that you're more
well-known for your novels. >> Richard Russo: Yeah, yeah. No, definitely. Definitely. >> Kevin Larimer: Yeah. >> Richard Russo: And I would
agree with what Lorrie said, in the sense that most
of the time, I know, too. When I begin working on
something, it has a certain feel to it, whether there's a
little material or a lot, and I can usually tell, but
there was one exception, and that was my novel That
Old Cape Magic, which is kind of interesting, because I think
that the reason it wasn't -- it was always going
to be a novel, but I think that the reason
that I didn't recognize it as such had to do
with something else, and that is that it was
the novel that I wrote after my longest and
most difficult novel. Not all novels cost
you the same thing, and this particular
novel, Bridge of Sighs, was not only probably
my most ambitious book, but it was also my most
problematic, and I made the kind of serious mistakes in it
that cost me sometimes 75 or 100 pages at a time. It wasn't that there wasn't
anything in those pages, but clearly the book
was not working, and -- >> Lorrie Moore: And what do
you mean by that, not working? >> Richard Russo:
Well, it just -- I mean I could just
tell it wasn't working. One of the things that I did was that there were three main
characters in it, and it seemed to me that I was going to
tell one character's story and then another
character's story and then another character's
story, but it was -- and so one point of view,
then another point of view, then another point of
view, and it just wasn't -- it just wasn't working. It was a bad decision. That point of view decision
was bad, and it cost me at least a year, and then I
made other mistakes like that, just huge, huge mistakes,
and long story short, by the time I got
to the end of it, I had spent about five years,
which is even long for me, and it was also dispiriting,
because I was making the kinds of mistakes that at that point,
for somebody who'd written as many books as I
had, I shouldn't be. At least it seemed
to me that I -- -- should not be making those
kinds of rudimentary mistakes, and it really upset me that I
was faithful to those mistakes for so long, you know. By God, I was going
to make it work. And so at the end
of it, I was just -- the needle on my gas gauge
was just bouncing off the E, you know, and so when I finished
that book and turned it in and it came time to do something
else, I started a short story, and it was about a guy
who was going to take -- it was going to take -- it was
going to be a one-day story, not like Ulysses, but a one-day
story, and it was about a guy who was going to -- he'd recently been given his
father's ashes, and he was going to put them in the trunk
of the car and drive over the Sagamore Bridge. He was living in
the Boston area. He was going to drive
on to Cape Cod and scatter his father's
ashes and come home. That was going to be the --
that was going to be the story, and it was -- so I
figured going into it, maybe 15 pages, 20 at the tops. Well, it got to be 15, 20, and suddenly the character's
mother was introduced, and the character's wife was
introduced, and then it got to be page 35, and I'm thinking
well, I can't fob this off. Even in the New Yorker, I'm not
going to, plus it wasn't ending, and then it was at 125 pages. Now I'm a novella. What am I going to do with this? And then it got to be about
175 pages, and I thought -- this was about the time that
On Chesil Beach came out, and I thought -- >> Lorrie Moore: Oh, yeah. >> Richard Russo: --
maybe I can fob this off on an unsuspecting
public as a novel. >> Lorrie Moore: That's
not very nice to say about On Chesil Beach. >> Richard Russo: And
I love Chesil Beach, and I love the fact
that he was able -- >> Lorrie Moore: I know. >> Richard Russo: -- to. And anyway, the book turned
out to be about 400 pages. Now my point in saying
the reason that I didn't recognize it
as a novel I think had to do with the fact that if I had
recognized it as a novel, I probably wouldn't
have begun it. I was exhausted. >> Lorrie Moore: Right. >> Richard Russo: I
was kind of dispirited. I would have thought to
myself oh, I'll write a couple of essays, I'll write a book
review, I'll write a short story and wait for some
more gas to appear in the tank, and
then I'll start. So basically, I think I just -- something in me fooled me
into beginning a novel. >> Lorrie Moore: Right. It had to come in
from another -- >> Richard Russo: Yeah. >> Lorrie Moore: -- angle. >> Richard Russo: Yeah, yeah. >> Lorrie Moore: Yeah. I just had dinner with Ann
Patchett the other night, because we both -- I live
around the corner from her in Nashville, and she said
she had just completed a novel and tossed it away. She very ostentatiously
said and I threw it away; I realized I was young
enough to write a bad novel, and I said well, how
much would you sell it to me for, and she said $1.69. I said sold, and so there's
going to be a novel coming out. >> Richard Russo: Your
first collaboration. >> Lorrie Moore: It's mine. >> Richard Russo: No,
it's going to be yours. >> Lorrie Moore: I caught it. >> Richard Russo:
You did pay for it. You paid for it. >> Lorrie Moore: I bought it. >> Kevin Larimer: It's like
an acknowledgment, I'm sure. >> Lorrie Moore:
She doesn't want to acknowledge it, but whatever. It'll be fine. But the idea of like
-- yeah, of backing up and realizing you made
all these mistakes and throwing things away,
it's so alien to me, but to me it's a sign of a true
novelist, which maybe I'm not, but I'm accumulating all kinds
of things when I'm working on this novel that I'm
working on, and I don't want to throw anything away. I just won't. I'm like a hoarder, you know. >> Richard Russo: Yeah. >> Lorrie Moore: I
write by hoarding, you know, so that's not good. That's why I had
to buy Ann's novel. >> Richard Russo: That's right. >> Lorrie Moore: She
sold it so cheaply. >> Richard Russo: But
the other point, though. Do you ever fool yourself? Have you ever discovered
that you've -- the back of your brain has
down something to the front of you brain to just
allow you to do something that you otherwise
wouldn't have done? >> Lorrie Moore: I have no
idea what you're talking about. >> Richard Russo: I'm
sure it's happened, that you just didn't
recognize it. >> Lorrie Moore: The back of
the brain is doing something? Oh, does something come in? Yeah, no. >> Richard Russo: See, I think
writers fool themselves all the time about various things. I just don't -- >> Lorrie Moore: Well, I do walk
-- and you know this feeling. You can walk around
for a very long time with either an entire book or
a completed book in your head, and you feel like it's
completed, and you feel like it's all there,
but you haven't put it into the sentences yet. You haven't put it into the
pages yet, or not entirely, and then when you go to do that, you write a very
different book -- >> Richard Russo: Yeah. >> Lorrie Moore: -- from
the one you were walking around with in your head. >> Richard Russo: Sure, sure. Well, one's a book
and one isn't, right. >> Lorrie Moore: I
guess that's right. >> Richard Russo: Yeah, yeah. >> Lorrie Moore: But it's too
bad you can't get the one that's in your head out there. >> Richard Russo:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it does remind you of
those people who come up to you and say I have this great book. Oh, I just -- >> Lorrie Moore:
This great idea. >> Richard Russo: I
have this -- yeah. Yeah, well, sometimes
they say it's a book, -- >> Lorrie Moore: And they
want you to write it. >> Richard Russo: -- and it's
an idea and they want you -- and they want you to write it. >> Lorrie Moore: Right. >> Richard Russo: And they say
the only thing I haven't -- the only thing I haven't
done yet is the words. >> Lorrie Moore: Yeah, the word. A very minor problem. >> Kevin Larimer: So Richard, the mistakes that
you mentioned -- >> Richard Russo: Yeah. >> Kevin Larimer: --
that you had made, did anybody help you realize that you had made
those mistakes? Did you have a reader
or an editor or anyone that you could -- that maybe
pointed some things out, or was it all on your own? >> Richard Russo: Well, for this
particular book, I have my agent to thank, Nat Sobel, who has
been my agent throughout my career, and with a lot of -- with a lot of Nat's
other writers, and with me if I
would allow it -- with a lot of his other writers, many of them are thriller
writers, but with a lot of his other writers, they
will send Nat pages, you know, chapters at a time,
and he'll comment, and I think it's
particularly helpful if you're writing a mystery
or a thriller to get that kind of help sometimes
in the early going. I'm very resistant to that,
and I don't let him -- I don't let him see anything
until it's done or until, as is the case with Bridge of
Sighs, where I wasn't finished, but I was done -- I
mean I was ready to -- I was waving the white flag. >> Kevin Larimer: Yeah. >> Richard Russo: And so I
gave him the 450 pages or so of the book, which was probably
two-thirds, and he read it, and we went for a
long walk during, and basically what I was
asking him to do was -- because I thought I might have
had three different books, three different characters,
three different books, and he very patiently said
no, it's the same book, but you've got three
different -- we've got three different
characters here. They're equally important, and you've got two
different locations. There's an American story
and an Italian story, and it takes place when
they're young and then when they're older, so there's
no middle in it in terms of their ages, and he said what
you're not doing is integrating those three things, and he
said what you really need to do is tell what's going
on at the end, what's going on at the beginning, what's
going on when they're young, what's going on when
they're old, and you need to be going back and
forth from points of view every 20 or so pages. And I spent the next hour as
we were walking explaining to him why that simply could
not be done, and by the end of that time, I realized, of
course, that it could be done. >> Kevin Larimer: It could be. Right, yeah. >> Richard Russo: And
perhaps it was the only way -- >> Kevin Larimer: Right. >> Richard Russo:
-- it could be done. That doesn't happen
to me as a rule, but I've never been more --
I've never been more thankful to anybody for explaining my own
book to me than I was to Nat -- >> Kevin Larimer: Yeah, right. Right. >> Richard Russo:
-- at that point, because I really
was at my wit's end. >> Kevin Larimer: Yeah. How about you, Lorrie? Do you have early readers or
an editor that you work with? >> Lorrie Moore: You know,
I really believe in that. I believe in showing
your work to people, but I used to never
show my work to anyone until it was time
to sell the book. You know, -- >> Kevin Larimer: Yeah >> Lorrie Moore: -- the
deadline was -- and I would -- and so my agent would be
the first one to look at it, and she's paid to say
nice things to me. >> Richard Russo: Yeah. >> Lorrie Moore: So at any
rate, she's a good reader, but more recently,
I've relied on a couple of writer friends to read. I mean it's a huge imposition. >> Richard Russo: Yeah, yeah. >> Lorrie Moore: But if you
can get friends to do it, and they won't say
the same things. They'll say -- >> Richard Russo: Right. >> Lorrie Moore: -- different
things, but you can kind of figure it out from the
different things they say what it is you should do
or can do or might do. So if you have some
people you trust, it's very important
and lucky and good. >> Kevin Larimer: Right. >> Lorrie Moore: I did not
work that way for a long time, because I was quite stubborn
and I didn't believe -- you know, I had gone to
graduate school and gone through that MFA workshop
process and listened to everybody's criticisms and
that, and I was so, you know, dutiful and attended all those
classes and never missed a one, and at the end of
those two years, I said I'm never showing my
work to anyone ever again. >> Kevin Larimer: Until
you want to, right? >> Lorrie Moore: No, ever. Ever. I didn't want to hear
one word about my work. >> Kevin Larimer: Yeah. >> Lorrie Moore: But now
I'm a little more flexible. >> Kevin Larimer: Right. Well, and you write
a lot of reviews. I mean you -- >> Lorrie Moore: Yeah. >> Kevin Larimer: You know. >> Lorrie Moore: Well,
not a lot, but yeah, I've been doing it
for a long time. >> Kevin Larimer: Yeah, right. >> Lorrie Moore: So
it looks like a lot. >> Kevin Larimer:
Right, right, right. But you know, so we
talked a little bit about the difference between,
you know, the different modes of writing in terms of stories
and novels, but what about -- you both have -- you're both
very well-known and acclaimed for fiction, and your two
new books are nonfiction. >> Lorrie Moore:
Yeah, what about that? >> Richard Russo: Yeah. >> Lorrie Moore:
What are we doing? >> Richard Russo: I don't know, but I'm never going
to do it again. >> Kevin Larimer: But you know, what's it like to approach
your nonfiction work versus your fiction? Is it a different switch
that you kind of flip to a totally different
head space? >> Lorrie Moore: Well,
Rick's books are really about the writing life
and personal essays about the writing life. >> Kevin Larimer: Right. >> Lorrie Moore: Mine are
critical pieces, by and large. There's some personal
essays, and they're very few. >> Kevin Larimer: There's a
great one called On Writing, which is very good, in there. >> Lorrie Moore: Oh, thank you. >> Kevin Larimer: Yeah. >> Richard Russo: Yeah. >> Lorrie Moore: Yeah,
there's one on writing, there's one on my honeymoon,
because here's the difference between nonfiction and fiction. When I got married, we
went to the courthouse and the 60 Minutes
crew was there to film us getting married. >> Richard Russo: It's
such a lovely story. It is, and I love it. >> Kevin Larimer: Beautiful. >> Lorrie Moore: You
cannot make that up, and that's the difference
between fiction and nonfiction. So that's why I had to write
a personal essay about that. >> Kevin Larimer: Right, right. >> Lorrie Moore: And that is
in -- that is in the book. Then no one would publish it, but that's a different
story, but you couldn't -- >> Richard Russo: Nobody
wanted to publish that? >> Lorrie Moore: Well,
someone commissioned it, and then they killed it. I got a kill fee for it. >> Richard Russo:
Oh, that's terrible. >> Lorrie Moore: And then my
poor agent said let's just -- I think she found it so
depressing, you know, and she said let's
just put this aside. >> Richard Russo: Yeah. >> Lorrie Moore: And so then
I put back in this book, so it's one of the few pieces
that had never appeared before, but in writing a
work of fiction, you couldn't very well
have a fictional couple -- >> Kevin Larimer: Right. >> Lorrie Moore: -- go to
get married at the courthouse and then take off
for their honeymoon and there's a 60 Minutes -- >> Kevin Larimer: Right. >> Lorrie Moore: --
camera crew who wants them to pose as a welfare couple. That's what the 60 Minutes
crew wanted us to do. >> Kevin Larimer: Did you know
they were there when you -- >> Lorrie Moore: No. >> Kevin Larimer: -- arrived? >> Lorrie Moore: No. That's why you can't
make this up. They said we're doing a
story on the governor's "wedfare" program, you know, where if welfare couples get
married, they get more money. This was a Clinton thing, too. He adopted it from the
Wisconsin governor. But we forgot to get footage
of a couple getting married. Would you pose as a welfare
couple getting married? And I said -- and my
husband, my then-husband, said yeah, let's do that. I was like, are you
out of your mind? >> Richard Russo: That's right. >> Lorrie Moore: No, no, no. So you know, the first -- >> Kevin Larimer: Yeah,
that's better nonfiction. >> Lorrie Moore: Yeah. >> Kevin Larimer: Yeah. >> Lorrie Moore: One of my
first words, you know, -- >> Kevin Larimer: Right. No. >> Lorrie Moore: -- in the
courthouse was "no, no, no," and we were divorced ten years
later, so there, but you can't, and the camera crew
was so disappointed. >> Kevin Larimer: Yeah. >> Lorrie Moore: Because they
said no one will know it's you, and then of course my
father was disappointed, because I then phoned him that
night and said, you know -- >> Kevin Larimer: He
wanted you to do it, yeah? >> Lorrie Moore: He said
you should have posed as that welfare couple, because
then I could have seen you get married. >> Kevin Larimer: All right. Sure, sure. >> Lorrie Moore: But if
you put this in fiction, it's not only -- it's
just unbelievable. >> Kevin Larimer: Yeah, right. Right. >> Richard Russo:
It's kind of insulting that they thought you
would pass, isn't it? >> Lorrie Moore: They were
going to film from the back. You should have seen my back. I don't know. I don't know what -- I mean
anyone can be on welfare. We should have been on welfare. >> Richard Russo: Well, I was going to say you're
a writer, so you're -- >> Lorrie Moore: Yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We had no money, but we were, -- >> Richard Russo: Yeah. >> Lorrie Moore: --
you know, whatever, not technically on welfare. >> Kevin Larimer: Richard,
how about you, just in terms of the nonfiction
versus fiction? >> Richard Russo:
Well, what I discovered in the two nonfiction books,
because I've written a memoir which is supposedly -- it's
supposed to be nonfiction, and then I wrote this book of
-- this book of personal essays which are also supposed
to be nonfiction. What I discovered to my
delight and, I have to say, a little bit embarrassment
is that I didn't find them as different as I
thought I was going to and as I probably should
have, because for me, the storytelling, the
storytelling urge kicks in, and when I was writing
the memoir, I mean obviously I wasn't
going to make things up. The story that I was telling was
too important, and it was more about my mother than me,
and I wanted to do right by her even though
I was writing a book that I knew she would hate, but
still, I was writing a story, and I found myself, for
instance, making decisions that a fiction writer makes, where a different writer telling
a story would have told -- would have told a part of
the book through narration that I just decided
to tell in scene. I slowed the narrative down. Could I remember exactly
what my mother and I said to each other 30 years ago? No, but I did know
the conversation that we had been having
all of our adult lives, and I could reconstruct that
in a way that was true in terms of the way I -- it was the
kind of truth that I was after in the book, and
I think that as people, as readers read that, you
either accept that or you don't. I mean one kind of reader would
say there's no way in the world that Richard Russo can remember
what he and his mother said to each other in the car
on the way to Arizona from upstate New York
when he was 18 years old. That just doesn't happen, and
it certainly doesn't happen if you know me, but there were
other readers who were willing to give me that license even
in nonfiction and say okay, he's not asking us to believe
exactly this moment in time, but that's what it was like, and
I found that -- I found that -- in the most personal of
the essays in this book, I found that to be true as well. The most personal essay in
it is called Imagining Jenny. It's about my dear friend Jenny
Boylan and what she was going through about ten or 15
years ago, between ten and 15 years ago as she
transitioned from male to female, and I was actually
a character in her memoir about all of this, and it
came, and so I wrote this as the afterword to her
book, and I wanted to -- I really wanted to write
that and tell it as a story and did it completely before
I even showed it to her because I really wanted it to
work as a story, and afterwards, fortunately there was nothing
in it that she objected to, but I'm sure that if we
were talking literal truth, there were probably times
when she would have said oh, I don't remember it
quite that way, you know. I think actually, it
was more like this, and once in the memoir,
where I'm talking about my daughter Kate's
wedding, I wrote a scene in that in which -- and I have it at
the wedding, at the reception after the wedding, and both
of my daughters came up to me and said yeah, that's
kind of what happened, but actually it happened before, the night of the rehearsal
dinner, and so I had a choice, and I kept it right where I -- >> Lorrie Moore: Yeah. >> Richard Russo: --
right where I had it. >> Kevin Larimer: Right. >> Richard Russo:
That's where it worked. >> Kevin Larimer: That's right. >> Lorrie Moore: Right. >> Kevin Larimer:
You're the writer. You're the writer, right. >> Lorrie Moore: The
sloppy memories -- >> Richard Russo: Yeah. >> Lorrie Moore: -- of
fiction writers, yeah. >> Kevin Larimer: Yeah. >> Lorrie Moore: That's
why we go there, you know. >> Richard Russo: Yeah. >> Lorrie Moore: You
don't have to be careful. >> Richard Russo: Right. >> Kevin Larimer: Well, we're
starting to run out of time. I have a whole lot of
questions, but I want to get to some audience questions, but
before we do, one quick one. This is the National
Book Festival. It's all about books. What are you guys
reading right now? Any book recommendations
for everyone? >> Lorrie Moore: I'm making
my way through Prairie Fires, the biography that won the
Pulitzer Prize, I think, -- >> Kevin Larimer: Right. >> Lorrie Moore: -- of
Laura Ingalls Wilder. It's a great history
of the Midwest. Brutal, brutal history. It's not a sweet Little
House on the Prairie story. >> Kevin Larimer: Right, right. >> Lorrie Moore:
It's quite bloody and awful and fascinating. >> Kevin Larimer: Yeah. >> Lorrie Moore: Yeah. >> Kevin Larimer: Great. Richard? >> Richard Russo: I
am now reading a novel that I've been wanting to
read since it came out, and I'm blanking on
the author's last name. Somebody in the audience
is going to be able to provide it, though. It's called Only in Sleep,
and it is by an author -- I've read a couple of
other of his books -- a couple other of his
books which I liked a lot, but this book was commissioned
by Raymond Chandler's -- -- estate, and he
was commissioned to write another Philip Marlowe
-- another Philip Marlowe novel, and boy, does he nail it. I'm about halfway through,
and he imagines Marlowe -- as the novel takes place in
1988, which makes Marlowe, who's been in retirement
for many years -- he is in his early 70s. Imagine Philip Marlowe in his
70s, having retired to Mexico. Lawrence, anybody? >> Osborne. >> Osborne. >> Osborne. Osborne. >> Lorrie Moore: Osborne. >> Kevin Larimer: Osborne. >> Lorrie Moore:
Lawrence Osborne. >> Richard Russo: Yes,
Lawrence, Osborne. Thank you. >> Kevin Larimer: Great. Okay. >> Richard Russo: I
mean who would dare? >> Lorrie Moore: This is
a really literate crowd. >> Richard Russo: Who
would dare to pretend to be either Philip
Marlowe or Raymond Chandler? >> Kevin Larimer: Right. >> Richard Russo: It's not
for the faint of heart, and it's a lovely --
it's a lovely book. You'll like it. >> Kevin Larimer: Excellent. Okay, and I just want to plug -- Barbara Kingsolver has a
novel coming out in October. It's called Unsheltered. I finished it. It's great. Absolutely great book. >> Richard Russo: Okay. >> Kevin Larimer: So be
on the look-out for that. Okay, so we have a few
minutes, about seven minutes for some questions
from the audience. Does anybody have a question? >> Lorrie Moore: No, they're
taking the opportunity to leave. >> Kevin Larimer: Anyone? >> Richard Russo: Keep in mind that we can barely
see the audience. >> Kevin Larimer: Yes. >> Lorrie Moore: We can't
see who you are, so. >> Kevin Larimer:
We have someone at the microphone here, though. >> Yes. A bunch of us,
Richard, are looking forward to hearing you on
-- I'm over here. >> Richard Russo:
Well, where is here? >> Kevin Larimer:
Over to the right. >> Over here. >> Kevin Larimer: To the right. >> Lorrie Moore: We can't see. It's over there. >> Richard Russo: Okay. Oh, okay. >> We're looking
forward to hearing you at the F. Scott Fitzgerald
celebration where you will be honored
this year as our honoree, and I know that towards
the end of Trajectory, there's a beautiful passage. There was a passage
in one of the stories where you reference Nick
Carraway, but I'd like to sort of spin off of the question
on what you're reading now and ask what shaped
both of you . What literary lights
made you the way you are? Which is wonderful, both of you. >> Richard Russo: No, go. Go, go. >> Lorrie Moore:
You know, I don't -- personally, I don't really
feel that I'm shaped. I know I'm shaped by everything. Is the question really
over here? >> Kevin Larimer:
She's right there. >> Lorrie Moore: Over there? >> Richard Russo: Oh, yeah. Oh, hi. >> Lorrie Moore: Okay. All right. But I'm sure I'm shaped by
everything that I really like. It's all food. It all goes in. It all nourishes you. There are some times
when I've explicitly sort of done a bounce off of
another writer's story, and it still doesn't
seem anything like that writer's story. It's not. So I mean one
has literary heroes. I don't think that one's
work is necessarily formed by them at all. If only. That would be so great. But you take a little
inspiration just by virtue of the fact that you know
there are things in the world that are this beautiful
to read, and you just want to also be part of that project. So go ahead. >> Richard Russo: My
novel Straight Man begins with an epigraph
from Fitzgerald. Is it Myrtle, I think? Who is it? Early in the book, they're at
a party and Nick is talking to this woman, Myrtle, who
has a dog, and she says -- it's just such brilliant
dialogue. She says they're nice to have,
a dog, and I love the way that goes from the plural
"they" to the singular "a dog." There's something about
that that's just so rich with that woman's voice. That shift from the plural
to the singular locates her in terms of class, and it's
just wonderful, and you pick up little things like
that wherever you go, wherever you read. You find little things. I think most writers read
with larceny in their hearts, and it's not that
you're going to -- it's not that you're going to
steal it now and use it now. It's that you put it away
in that little closet and you think that'll, you
know, do me well at some point if I remember it, and
I remember, I think -- I remember thinking that
way about Fitzgerald, too, in terms of The Great
Gatsby, understanding really for the first time
what the difference is between a book being about
a character and a book being that character's story,
because that's a stark example of that, isn't it? It's about Gatsby, but
it's not Gatsby's story, it's Nick's story, and I think
it was that book that I began to -- I mean I understood
it kind of intellectually, the way we do sometimes. You'll understand something. But it made sense to me, I
think, for the first time. >> Kevin Larimer: Okay,
another question over here. >> All right. Thank you for a wonderful
and funny conversation today. I didn't expect it
would be this funny. So I was wondering -- you
talked about how stories grow up in your hands, and sometimes
they turn into short stories or novels, but I was
wondering, what is that moment like when the story
is born in your head? Like one minute, it's not
there, and the other minute, it's there, and what is that
-- where is it coming from? Where is that light of
ray coming into your head and bringing this
beautiful story to existence? >> Lorrie Moore: I think for
me -- I mean for every writer, it's a little different. For me, stories begin
with an emotion. I mean sometimes it's language
and characters and voice and setting that sort of
spur you on, but for me, I'm very interested in
a complicated emotion and what kind of story
could contain that -- not express it, not describe
it, but actually contain it, so that a reader could
walk into a narrative and have that same feeling. I think I've lost the
questioner in the lights. There you are. >> Kevin Larimer: She sat down. There she is. >> Lorrie Moore:
Wrap it up, it says. >> Richard Russo: Yeah. >> Lorrie Moore: Okay. Here, you go. So and then once you have that
emotion and you build a world that can contain it and
a voice, you wrap it. >> Kevin Larimer: Wow. Wrong lights. >> Richard Russo:
Yeah, now they're -- >> Kevin Larimer: Wrong lights. Okay. >> Richard Russo: Yeah,
we're supposed to wrap it up, so I'll just say very
quickly I agree with Lorrie. Those moments, the aha
moment in the story, it'll come at different
times in different books. Sometimes it'll be a
character revelation. Sometimes it'll be something. I remember very distinctly
in Empire Falls, there was a moment, and I was at
least halfway through the book, when I thought to myself oh,
this book is about cruelty, and I didn't know that
before, and so we love those. We love those, when suddenly
we know something today that we didn't know yesterday,
but it comes, and it's different in each book, I think. >> Lorrie Moore: Rachel Cusk
says every good story is about cruelty. >> Richard Russo: I wouldn't
necessarily disagree with that. >> Lorrie Moore: I know. I know. I think it's
worth thinking about. >> Kevin Larimer: Thank
you all for coming. >> Richard Russo: Thank you. >> Kevin Larimer: Thank
you, Richard, Laurie. Thank you.
