Lorrie Moore & Deborah Treisman in conversation - The New Yorker Festival - The New Yorker

my name is debra treasman i'm the fiction editor at the new yorker and it's my pleasure to welcome you to the 11th annual new yorker festival and to tonight's conversation with laurie moore um we'll be talking up here for about an hour and then we'll have some time for questions from you so be prepared for that please turn off your phones please don't take any photographs and i've been asked to inform you that if you're planning to tweet about this event you should use the hashtag tnyfest so no no tweeting without the hashtag in her story how to become a writer laurie moore wrote why write where does writing come from these are questions to ask yourself they're like where does dust come from or why is there war or if there's a god then why is my brother now a i think it's safe to say that you will never find a story uh by laurie that asks such direct questions and yet by the time you get to the end of one of her books you feel you have the answers moore is one of america's funniest writers she's also one of our saddest her comedy is sharpest when she's writing about disaster and she's never never her sense of tragedy is never stronger than when she's writing about people trying to have fun as the guardian recently put it her subject matter is the laughter of funerals and the tragic comedies of love she deals with the facts of life in all meanings of the word from love sex food to war sickness and death she's the author of three novels anagrams who will run the frog hospital and most recently the best selling a gate at the stairs as well as three volumes of short stories several of which we've had the honor to publish in the new yorker please welcome laurie moore see you only have to follow me you don't have to follow jason schwartzman that's right that's right well this is the welcome to the red herring we can do anything we want now we have a sort of musical sort of backup act if the q a starts to sort of wear yeah yeah if things go wrong just ask us to sing um i'm going to start at the beginning so when you were 19 oh not quite the beginning when you were 19 you won um a uh 17 magazine fiction contest and that was your first published story when had the impulse to write first hit you were you writing as a child i think your father and your grandfather both wrote was it something in the house oh i was writing as a child i'm still writing as a child i think um i don't know you know i always wanted to win the art contest in 17 magazine i was one of those you know provincial upstate new york girls and i would get word of the world from 17 magazine which was this big glossy thing sold in drugstores and they had an art contest and um and then they had the fiction contest but i never entered the art contest and just you know when i was just eligible finally to enter the contest i i entered a story instead of any artwork and it was the first thing i'd ever sent out and it came back with a 500 check and i thought well this is really going to be easy and nobody would publish anything i wrote for about 10 years but um so it was a slightly you know it was a red herring of sorts 50 a year it's not bad yeah and it continued sort of in that being yeah but you've been writing in high school and thinking about you know i did i did what the the english teachers wanted me to do you know i wrote the stories and all that they assigned and the creative writing assignments and i'd love to do them um but i i don't know i'd love to do a lot of things i i don't know i'd love to you know play the piano and play the guitar and memorize neil young songs and stuff so it was all part of it's in this it's the it's just okay the microphone yeah you're fine okay can everyone here yeah no i can feel things i'm i'm sort of wired up like i got wired up by lester freeman or something backstage there [Laughter] and uh see there's some wire heads in the audience [Applause] [Laughter] um i hope you can hear me where were we um you said once uh not to quote you to yourself but that part of your talent for writing came out of your capacity for solitude is that something that i said though you still have a capacity for solitude i do i do but you know i was just i was talking to my sister today at lunch and i was saying you know you can't carve solitude out of loneliness you've got a people your life you've got to you've gotta have a life that's sort of really rich and that suddenly gets annoying and irritating and then you carve your solitude out from there and close the door and do your work and then you open the door and come out and there your life carries on but um and she said that's an interesting point see that's what sisters are for anyway it's been something i've i've been mulling over because of course the capacity to be alone the capacity to work in a solitude in his fashion is key to to any artist's life and and writers do that and i had a capacity to do it as well but i also had when i was growing up a kind of noisy house that i would escape from you know closing the door and listening to records and writing things and you know closing the door and all that and then um at some point you decided to do an mfa at cornell and this was back at a time when it wasn't maybe quite as trendy as it is now to do an mfa so what is it trendy that's not a good word seems like everyone's doing it um yeah i was reading an article in the london review on the plane did you read that piece no it's a critique of mfa programs but she keeps referring to program fiction and that's to her i mean i don't know it was a phrase i'd never heard but she's from england english yeah have mfa fiction and it's program fiction with two m's and an e yeah so okay um i don't know i i thought of mfa programs at the time as being a kind of support system as a kind of cafe as a place that would somehow provide you with an environment that you couldn't afford on your own because mfa programs the best ones support the writers that that go there and um and so i i just wanted to do that that was always in my mind i had a teacher in college who had an mfa from iowa and so i knew that there was this option i think mfa programs also democratize the opportunity to write which is the phrase i've said before it sounds really kind of i don't know kind of bumpy as i say the democratization of the opportunity to write but that's really the main part of what it does it allows you to write if you're poor if you can't afford to quit your job and need someone to sort of be there as a safety net for you to quit your job and take two years and write so that's what an mfa program was for me i had been working in a law firm here in new york for a couple of years before i went to cornell and then you came out of cornell and uh at 26 you published your first collection of stories self-help oh no i think i was the older the record says you were 26. the record the record says that yes the records also says this is an exchange which i assume means that i get to be literary editor of the new yorker after all and you get to go back to wisconsin and teach creative writing i'm sorry my fact checkers tell me that the 26 was the age you were i think um it was very young um um it actually came out when i was 28 28. i think i signed the contract when i was 26. there you go that's what i saw okay we'll exchange i signed i signed the contract for the book at 26. that's young signing contracts yeah was it um was it a shock to be published so long so so young how did you how was the response how did you cope with it um how did i cope with selling 7 000 copies seven thousand is not bad that's and that was after five stories that's true they reposted five times that's all you represented it five times in manchester to get the number of thousands reprinted five times the last printing was only 800 copies i said i i said to my editor i said well the next printing will just be pages one through 85. they did very small printings how did i cope with it i don't know people were reading all it was so long ago people were reading you and that for for the first time they were that must have seven thousand people did that well that book had a certain had was sort of a theme book and it had this this concept which was uh the title was self-help and each story was structured as a kind of um not necessarily a parody of self-help but of uh using the language of self-help manuals to write about other things right how did you come up with that idea um i probably stole it knowing me i think it was it was a voice that i had seen already and in a lot of poems there i mean the second person is used all the time in poetry the second person is used a lot in in short story writing as well i mean i think michael conningham had written a story very early on that i had read that i thought it was beautiful um and i noticed that the poets would sometimes leave the u of the sentence and that when you did that the verb was in the front of the sentence and was really quite strong and powerful and i thought you could write a whole story like this in the imperative it would be kind of the mock imperative how would be pretending how to when in fact it's how not to and so i wrote one story like that it was called how but and i was in graduate school at the time and then that voice just kept cutting a groove and i went back and i wrote another one and another one and then it was how to do this and how to do that and how to be whatever and i thought oh my god am i never going to get out of this voice i wrote six stories like that and then i was done that was it yeah yeah well in that in that book and and a lot of what you've done since then um you were tell me if i'm wrong it's an exchange you were [Laughter] grappling with uh quite directly with with the lives of women in america and with the lives of women in this society and and challenges they face i think you you said that that book was about feminine emergencies um i said that i did my research laurie that's good um do you feel do you feel it as sort of uh imperative to write about women in america i i certainly did when i was younger i i really did feel when i looked out into the literary landscape that there were few there weren't enough you know stories about and by women in a real way you know they were there were some that you could point to and that i loved and all of that but i felt there should be more and so i i thought there i felt yeah a kind of calling to do that and i did in fact wonder at the time i thought what would cause a young man to write a story because they look out into the landscape and there's all these stories by men what would you know why would they even bother why don't they go do something else and make way for us gals um but i did i did feel that i i feel that less now because i feel the world has changed and there's lots of women riding and um and sometimes i just love to hop into the consciousness and mind of a male character and i've done that a number of times which i did not do in my first book but i started to do in books after that is it easy it's fun it's fun to be a guy i like being a guy you know i like being a guy for 25 pages [Laughter] do you find it harder to do that voice or is it it's not a voice it's point of view i really don't know how to do the voice i've never written in the voice of a of a man i really i have tried and i really had a hard time doing it but i can write in the point of view so this the story has its own voice but it's hovering close to the point of view of a man and so your fault you're tracking his imagination and his feelings and his experience and that's fine yeah well you did that in in the story debarking which is what i'm picking up um specifically right um that story and also your new novel a gate at the stairs um deal with another serious subject which is what it what it is to be living in america post 9 11. um not dealing directly with 9 11 necessarily but what how that changed our life and is that is that a subject you feel sort of you felt driven to explore well i think all writers are writing you know in response to what they think are the important themes of their time and their country and their world and it's hard to you know it's hard to run away from certain things but usually you know especially if you're in wisconsin things kind of come up tangentially you know um they're not usually directly in town but in madison we've had a history of terrorism we've had you know we've had we've had things happen in madison too so i think all writers want to sort of include the things they think are real and and and interesting about about the world they live in i never felt i was writing directly about 9 11 at all but that you were to me it seems that you were writing about what happened to the mindset to sort of one's mindset in daily life after 9 11 not not necessarily what happened in new york yeah i may have done that by accident i mean i actually in the novel you mean yeah or the story with both of them yeah well yeah i guess they're kind of in different ways right debarking is really less about 9 11 than the build-up to the iraqi war and about a a guy who's just first of all he's been divorced he's trying to date but and then the war is is starting up and it's just making him crazy the way it really made us all crazy in 2003 um and so i thought that weird combination would be interesting and i hoped it wouldn't be insulting or diminishing to put all of that into one character's life because it really was co-existing in people's lives you know the news you know your own personal life and it was all happening at the same time so i wanted to do that the novel was really more interested i think in in the ways in which soldiers are called up a little bit i mean to the extent that it was about war about how young men are called into war by older men i also saw a lot of my students who were in the national guard getting called up and for the iraqi war and i found that very alarming as did they [Music] so a lot of writing students in the national guard undergrads yeah i mean we could you know reservists yeah but the reservists were called up yeah the reservists were called up i mean it's it's really something no one expected that that a war would be fought by national guard disservice right it was well on the subject of madison you you grew up in in glen falls new york and lived in the city and and various places and then when you were i don't know 26 27 28 you moved to madison um to start teaching there and you've been there ever since has i did i did move one you were you went back and forth for a while yeah i did i lived there for i moved there when i was 27 and i talked for a year and then i went to the chairman of the department and said i'm losing my mind i have to leave can i take a leave of absence and he was very nice he said yes so i got a moving van and packed up and i moved to hal's kitchen good plan where it's fine to lose your mind healthy kitchen in the 80s really nice um but i actually was so happy to be there i really loved it um until i didn't i was there for a couple years and i was going for a couple years i went back and forth i would go back to wisconsin they were very nice and tolerant of me i went back for a semester with teach and then come back to new york for eight months so i had a kind of my version of a bi-coastal relationship you know that goes a relationship with my coastal lifestyle you know hell's kitchen madison wisconsin it's the poor man and you chose madison it's the poor man's bi-coastal life right um yeah i did eventually i realized my cat hated it here i'm thinking of cats now because this light you know brings out all the cat hair it's really scary they can't see it out there you know the hotels because they're afraid of anyone seeing bed bugs the lighting is so dim so so you don't see the cat hair and you put your makeup on this harem scarum way and then you go out into the lights like this which i haven't seen in a long time um and then yeah then i and i had a job in madison i had a boyfriend in madison and then i finally thought well what am i doing here i should go i should go back to madison and marry the boyfriend and buy a house and have a kid and do that so i did that got that all the way and um yeah what else do you want to know um how much is madison part of you as a writer how much is wisconsin as part of you as a writer do you feel very identified with that you know i do but they don't i mean they don't don't worry about them yeah i'm i'm very much treated as an outsider and as a new yorker after 25 years yeah isn't that strange um it's a little strange sort of like japan you know what i said i said that it too in the english press and then they printed it and it looked really really racist and weird all right take it i take it back i still don't realize i said it's like japan where if you're not there for you know generations they treat you as an outsider and there it was you know and the scotsman you know oh well establishment always gets people in trouble isn't that the one that got what's her face fire samantha power yeah samantha power got fired after the scotsman got hold of her is this where we go into our luck no no this is this is where you talk about writing about the midwest oh writing about the midwest well i you know there's there's much to write about there and there's much that i think is interesting there and of course a college town is always weird and eccentric and not typical of of the state um and so i i'm never i'm never out of ideas i'm just out of time but i it's it's a lot of come come visit i did it that's right i don't get any credit for that um you're never out of ideas where do the ideas come from are you it's the dreaded question how much how much you mine your life for ideas how much are you simply observing and and drawing from what you see around you you want percentages i want you to tell me any way you like well it's always a combination i mean you'd you know it would be boring just to write something that you've already lived it would just be boring but you can live something or encounter something or see something or hear something and get very interested in it and [Music] you know then you start to write a story and you're borrowing from this and you're borrowing from yourself i mean so it's all a mix it's a it's a collage yeah it's a collage and that's the only way it can be fun for for the rider and also be be important and not casual i mean you can't have a casual interest in something and make it work it has to be a very personal relationship to it on the other hand it also has to be something that you're discovering that you're bringing your imagination to or otherwise it's dull to do now you you've written you've written three novels you've written three books of stories you're sort of evenly divided between the two forms how do you know which one you're going to do when you sit down to write do you prefer one to the other that's that's where you get out the contracts and see which one it is you're supposed to do [Laughter] um that's not true you've written stories in the middle of working on novels that's true thank you for noticing [Laughter] i don't know i i i can feel the impulse to write a story always and feel that it's it's not a novel and when i start to feel i'm getting an idea that needs a longer just a longer treatment um then i'll sort of start collecting notes for a novel um but you know i have one novel per decade you know it's not really it's i'm not i'm not busy as a novelist i'm i have more story i'm gonna quote you you once said that the novel was like a marriage and the story is like a love affair [Music] do you love your stories more are you more passionate about them i don't you know i said that once and somebody said what is your marriage like it's like a novel because my marriage isn't like a novel um i don't know i i i actually you know finishing this last novel i really love the process of a novel because you just keep going back to it and it's there it says you know it's it is like in a way it's like a marriage you just you know you walk into your study there's your desk you say honey i'm home and you sit there and you work on it some more and it's you do this over a period of years the characters are still there the setting is still there and it's and it's really a beautiful thing it's a short story you you struggle with over more you know a shorter period of time and it's more um i don't know why i said love affair i don't even think i've ever had a love affair [Music] but it seems like that's what a love affair would be you know something something really quick and intense and beautiful and then it's done and then you never see each other again and that's the way i feel with the characters in a short story i think goodbye good luck to you i will never see you again so maybe that's what i meant yeah yeah i thought you liked doing short stories i do but when i'm done with the stories i don't want to see those characters again yeah i would never start up another story with the same characters so you've never had a novel start as a story and then no i never have had that no no i know lots of writers have that but i i don't it's very clear to me usually do you feel like there's a difference in the actual writing and the actual sort of intensity line by line um well you have to you might be a little more worried about pacing and time and all of that with with the story and you might stretch out and get more leisurely in a novel it depends yeah it depends on the novelist depends on the short story but in general you know writing is writing and you know your sensibility is your sensibility you're just trying to bring the characters and the setting and the particular story you're trying to write about forward obviously with a novel you feel you can stretch more um your writing is funny funny funny ha ha often that's not something that's very easy to do there are very few people who can write funny and still and not be writing humor pieces how hard is it for you to do i think a humor piece would be very hard to do actually i have great respect for human jesus i know humorists don't don't like to be called humorous actually i think they feel it's kind of some lower level of writing but i i think that's very hard to do i don't know for me i don't i feel that the the world is essentially very funny on the surface and the underlying facts are really are really horrifying so the it's very easy when you're telling a story to sort of imagine the texture of something that would be really really funny to include um the things people might say the awkward little moments that would make you laugh but underneath every story the facts of life and and existence on this planet are really really difficult ones they're really hard you're you're the only person i know who can be funny when writing about cancer and death and you know somehow you managed to bring those things in yeah you have yeah yeah um i always think that when life events sort of knock you down flat you know that you can't write it all and that's just you know it's just too hard but as you start to pick yourself up and brush yourself off and pull the cat hair off of the trousers that there's then you start cracking jokes and pete and it's true for everybody you know someone falls down initially they're like ah but as soon as they start getting back up they start making a joke i mean even ronald reagan was making jokes in the hospital after he was shot but probably not making jokes right away you know even he mr showbiz needed needed a half an hour to sort of start cracking his jokes but there's there's a way in which processing a bit of trauma but feeling that things are going to that you're going to survive it's sort of an instinct it's it's a piece of resilience is what it is and that humor comes out of that um people people crack jokes all the time at funerals and you know because it releases tension and it's also about recovering in a resilient way from something that's knocked you down you have a particular affection for puns i oh know that that's true i think i could i think i get accused of that more than i should [Laughter] um you um in that in those first stories in self-help and and some of the stories after that you wrote as we said you wrote a lot about young women grappling with with society and with dating with character forming and so on and then later you've written quite a lot about children and about motherhood um you you said that a gate at the stairs was a little like the wizard of oz and i was in wonderland um and you've also written for children do you foresee writing for children more no i don't but then you know if you want to know if you want to know what's going to happen in the world just ask me what's not going to happen i'm a very bad predictor i said absolutely no way would ronald reagan be elected you know that kind of thing um you know so i don't i don't envision myself writing more children's stories but you never know what was it about a gate at the stairs that makes you compare it to alice in wonderland well i was thinking of the way of this the the sort of traipsing through the midwest quality and the encountering of grotesque characters you know it it's shaped more like someone who's it's shaped more like a journey the way alice in wonderland is and the way the wizard of oz is as opposed to shaped like a henry james novel where forces press on each other and something erupts it's more it's more going down the road you know the way alice is the way dorothy gail did um the sort of venus innocent girl at the center yeah encountering yeah and the wizard of oz it's the midwestern girl so yeah yeah and i did name her mother gail nobody noticed but me but you know those are the kinds of things that amuse writers after death [Laughter] so back to madison you've been teaching for 25 years right something like that oh longer i'm afraid has teaching how is teaching for you has it had an effect on on your own you'll find out this is an exchange i think you're gonna like welcome to editing you're gonna like that too and yeah and when my students send me their manuscripts as i sit in your chair in the office um how is teaching teaching um teaching is fine does it have an effect on your own work teaching writing i wish um no not really no it does in some ways it can make you more self-conscious it can i mean initially when i started teaching and before there were spell checkers teaching just wrecked your spelling because you were just reading see that teacher here because you're reading all these misspelled things and then you start to write your own [Music] your own stuff and it's all misspelled as well and you're like you just you forget how to spell i mean the most the most simple words you're suddenly thinking does disappointed have two you know you just s's get you know you lose your bearing um but now there's spell checkers so there's things like you know she she combed her hair h-a-r-e you know were they um i don't know i'm trying to think with a peak p-i-k [Laughter] i don't know um but it's so early on it affected the writing that way and even now i think well if this if one of my students did this would i be would i allow that you know you it raises it raises your your self-consciousness a little bit and raises the bar i have great students they're really nice and smart and fun they're really nice people do you feel like you've formed anyone formed anyone no their parents have done a very good job i have done it they've done an excellent job no i'm only there as a kind of editor and cheerleader and you know and i'm there to sort of say pay no attention to what caitlyn just said you know because caitlyn because sometimes they listen to each other too much so i'm there for that um but no they're they're really they're almost too you know they're almost too nice you just do start to worry that somehow we're creating this whole generation of literary people who are so damn nice you know whatever happened to the bill burrows of america you know um but i don't know yeah when you write are you writing for any particular audience do you have anyone in mind i have you in mine deborah set myself up for that one uh i do you you you know what you probably have no idea but every writer in america is going what is debt treason going to think about i don't know i'm just going to barrel and start singing all the time no seriously [Applause] i was i was serious though i don't you imagine a reader do you think do you think about who's going to read it i imagine the perfect reader who of course doesn't exist except you my dear um but i you know okay i'll take your next story [Laughter] i think it's gonna be too long though i don't think it'll fit well i will talk later you know i don't have a group of people i show my work to which is probably unusual i think it's a good thing to do that and if there are writers in the audience who are wondering whether they should do that or not i if you can get people it's a lot to ask of people to read you know read my work and tell me what you think that's a that's a lot to ask and i just never dared ask anyone to do that um except i did do it with this last book i had i had i gave it to two literary friends who were terrific and had things to say but if you have people you trust and you show drafts to them and you have some kind of arrangement that's that's a very that's a good system to have in um at least for most of my writing life the first person to see my work has been my literary agent who is an excellent reader she's a very good reader because she gets paid [Laughter] she gets paid to say nice things to me so why wouldn't she be my first reader so but you know the ideal reader of course is somebody who once you're really done with the story completely gets it and understands it and has the experience that you wanted them to have and that's not everybody that you know like you cannot write for everybody not everybody is your ideal reader so there's and you don't really know who your readers are until you know they come up to you and tell you or they send you a letter you know you can suddenly you know you know have a conversation with your readers that way but um but if you if you can get a few people who get what you do who and they won't and no one likes everything that a writer does you know every every reader has their favorite books of a writer and i'm the same way with the writers i admire and but if you can get a few people to sort of get it have the experience you want them to have um and that the book wants them to have i mean that's that's the best you can hope for even if it's seven thousand seven thousand yeah seven thousand you know i didn't know what to think of that when i was twenty eight and sold seven thousand copies i thought seven thousand people bought my book i can't believe it i thought 7 000 that's not very good because there probably were old libraries i don't know um but i thought who could these 7 000 people possibly be yeah but and then of course the next book only sold five thousand so i thought whoa i've lost two thousand believe it um at any rate yes as you know you can't please everybody that's what every writer has to know yeah um you've mentioned that alice monroe is one of your literary heroes is there who else would be in that category is there anyone else who's had no one's in a category with her she's in her own category she's just so great um but i i there are books by a lot of people i mean now i'm thinking of all the canadians in honor of you because you're part canadian sort of you lived in canada i lived there for four years yeah so we'll do canada i never got citizenship but i'll i'll accept park canadian yeah i love i i loved margaret atwood when i was first starting to write just loved her style especially her prose style which is a style that she really worked up i think in her poem she started as a poet and i don't know i could just list writers michael and dodgy the english patient i think is one of the great novels of of the last 100 years i really do think that it's a great great novel the movie's a bad movie version don't i can say that now that the director of it died [Laughter] i hope there's no relatives in the audience but actually that director is a great director and did some lovely films but that was not one of them but it's a great novel the english patient so what do you recommend that your students read right now i recommend that they read the work of whoever's visiting that semester so this semester we have ethan kanan and mary gordon coming so they're reading emperor of the air and the palace the two wonderful collections by ethan kane and mary collected stories so um there's been a recent you know brouhaha in the media over jonathan franzen being hailed the great american novelist and um quite apart from whatever you think of his novel the uh people came out and said a woman writer would never be called the great american novelist and um some people mentioned you as an example of who should be um and why why is jonathan and these various women writers aren't do you think it's it's true that we would not that this culture wouldn't wouldn't anoint a woman writer in the same way i don't know you know i have to say i think john franzen handled that response very well he said it's true women don't get the attention that they should get and i i thought really because i have i have male writer friends who think that women get all the attention that if the bestseller lists are full of women and that you know it's you know so i i don't know i don't have the research or the stats i don't really know um you know the our nobel laureate is tony morrison right we have another fiction writer who no i didn't do research on that so that's our nobel laureate um tony morrison so i mean i don't know i i i don't i suppose i have a dog in that race yes to to use an expression but i i haven't put the dog in the race because i don't really know enough i haven't given it enough clear thought um and i don't really know when that when the brouhaha starts to to come up i don't even know really know what people are talking about basically they just their blogs are talking to each other and i don't know if we're talking about being on the cover of time magazine um you know one part of me said oh time magazine must not be doing very well they're putting a writer on the cover that's okay they had a pelican on the cover so you know a bulldog so why not a writer um but i don't know i mean i don't know do you feel as though in your in your life being a woman who writes a lot about women has ever stood in the way of of people's response to the work that being a woman has stood in the being that being a woman who writes about women uh to a great extent has ever sort of affected how people read your work i don't know again you know i'm not i don't know i'm not in the media like that i don't have a blog i'm just living in madison [Laughter] and you know are you tweeting no no because like our university does that it's re do you tweet no i can't really say that margaret's she didn't just do that for her book tour she continues to do it she what does jane smiley tweet i think she has a blog oh i don't have that much to say no i don't have that so i don't know you know somebody would have to i mean it's up to if someone wants to complain about the gender thing i mean you can't just go with hunches and feelings and your own personal story you have to sort of get out there with the stats here are the prizes here the sales here the here's the money numbers here so that you know and i don't have any of that and i as far as i can tell nobody who is talking about it has it either yeah yeah but some but that's you know someone does that then you just look at the numbers yeah yeah i think it's difficult to look at you can look at how many how many people are published but you can't find out how many people are trying you know well you would know that wouldn't you i um well actually i i would say that when i started um at the new yorker 13 years ago probably about 70 to 75 percent of the manuscripts i got were written by men and i would say that now it's probably about 50 50. 55 45 maybe 55 so it's still the majority of men still more for men but getting close now how do you explain that how do you yeah what's your theory this is good how do i explain it yeah i think i think more uh women are taking time to write and considering writing a career then we're doing it uh 20 years ago but when we look at nfa applications it's not more men than women it's even though but it's evening out but maybe it was some 20 years ago the men have more courage to send their stories to the new yorker than the women maybe i think that was definitely true in the past but you know we just we we just did this 20 under 40 project right when we did it 11 years ago 5 out of the 20 riders were women and this time 10. so there there has been not not through conscious effort but simply by what's out there and who's right right um so there's definitely been a shift right that i've seen well i have a sense that there are a lot of women writing and writing terrifically and like you know but i i'm it's curious to me that it's not 5050s yet that's a new yorker for submission well we're waiting for the older generation to you know get out of there so it's the old guy still spending in their stuff oh well on that note i think if you don't want us to sing maybe we should open up to questions from the audience um and there are microphones there and there and it would be great if whoever has a question could step up to the microphone since we're taping all these brave people you're so brave i would never do that i really don't want to be first um so i thought of this very early when you guys were speaking um you spoke about well it's actually interesting because you came back around we were talking about women writers that when you started you felt that there should be more room for women writers um and it reminded me of something i read recently about readers and that um so many more readers now are women and that men are not reading as much as women is much fiction yes fiction yes um so i'm an english teacher i teach high school english in the bronx and i have a very hard time getting my boys to be interested in whatever it is we're reading and it's something that really concerns me and saddens me and i'm just wondering if you had any any thoughts or ideas on how to get the boys interested especially i mean we just read oedipus for example and the boys loved it because they were they did they loved it because it was like exciting and there was you know sex and gore and they were happy um but uh you know we're gonna be reading pride and prejudice and uh i'm a little concerned that they're gonna be not coming to class so yeah i don't know i think i think what you should do is keep a list because i have i have a teenage son and he's not a reader either yeah and he doesn't you know and i and when i was starting to read to him when he was little i noticed the really girly bent to a lot of books by you know for children and and he was most interested in stories that mirrored his life and somehow that could then get him thinking and so he liked the stories about guys and school um actually judy blew he loved when he was little he loved the judy blue fudge books yeah you know yes we have some fans we love those he loved books about animals there were there was even a joyce carlos picture book about a kitten he just loved that um but and then he loved shirt as he got older he loved sherman alexis you know um absolutely true diary of a part-time indian love that and i think that's a book that yeah have you taught that sometimes teach that to boys the boys will love it right there's people nodding but i think what we need to do is make a list of what works for boys because there there aren't a lot of books out there that and i don't i think pride and prejudice is not unless it's the one with the zombies so you don't think there's any way to sell it then no just to be in the business of having to sell it i mean my my son was complaining that he had to read um young goodman brown you know the hawthorne straight and he wasn't going to read it and then then later he was bragging that he had aced the quiz without reading a word which is you know that's the kind of teenage son i have so but i looked at that and i thought oh i don't know that's a hard sell to teenagers you know when you have shirt so when you have sherman alexie to sell them what don't let them read nathaniel hoffman when they get to college you know i mean don't don't try to force this stuff early because it'll just turn them off i think that's what happens there's a kind of set curriculum and people say well you've got to teach this much shakespeare in this much hawthorne and you know and then the boys get turned off but instead just give them the books that that excites them good luck with pride and prejudice thank you so much i'll do it don't worry uh we'll we'll alternate science so i was just wondering what's the most startling thing you've ever discovered about yourself while you were writing and you know yeah if it's too personal you can say it's none of my business i'm not in a process of self-discovery when i'm writing so if i'm discovering anything about myself i don't know it i think i'm discovering discovering something about the story i'm i'm just working in service of the story the characters the language you know to the extent that one discovers oneself one discovers the limitations of one's self in trying to write this story but it's not it's not a you know it's not about me now it there may be a lot of me in there but i'm not making that the project so i'm not paying attention um so the most alarming thing i discover is how how limited my vocabulary is things like that how i can't come up with the right word and you know you know you discover all the bad things about yourself as a writer so sorry um i have seen that you like to write quite a bit about imperiled children and i'm thinking of uh the baby's diaper and people like that and uh the car accident in a gate at the stairs the boy with cystic fibrosis and i was wondering what draws you to this subject and if you think it's going to be a lifelong interest of yours or something here you're just doing now oh i'm just a sick person i'm just i don't know it doesn't seem like a kind of mental illness doesn't it but i do think if you look at literature the great fear of losing a child with the death of a child is the theme everywhere it's everywhere in literature because it's everywhere in life it's it's it's it's the worst thing that can happen to you to lose a child that's just the worst thing so when you're trying to sort of think about sad stories or stories where people have to confront extreme things i mean writers are sort of stalking horses you know they go out and test the edges of madness and grief and death and come back to tell the tale if they can and um so you know they're they're led out to these extreme experiences not that i haven't had some of them myself but you know um it's it's something that it's something that historically writers have always gone to to imagine and just and to try to [Music] um to try to bring back to the people who haven't had those experiences you know what that means that doesn't ask the question very well see i'm up against the limitations of myself well you use that metaphor in people like that of the writer going out and seeing grief and madness and flailing and feeling in our head yeah you did and then finding a way to put it into words there you go yeah oh i think i was oh that's in that little thing about the trip right the the the rider takes a trip and then comes back and tries to tell the tale of the trip um and that's where the narrator comes in because the writer can't really do it the right so the narrator actually tells the tale rather than the person who had the experience um yeah i was trying to get into some differentiation between story fact narrator author in that section of the story i not everything that i write has an imperiled child in it but lately yeah but there are there are a number of examples it's true i'm i'm working on something right now that has no children in it at all so none of them are imperiled so we'll see thank you so the conversation today began when you were 19 but i'm wondering what happened before then and why you started writing and why mainly my question is why you decided to submit that to 17 why not keep it uh something personal and sacred to you why what was the point where you decided to send it out into the world what was that moment like when you decided you wanted to be seen well i was just a shy girl in a small town in the adirondacks and i wanted to win that 17 magazine contest but i thought i wanted to win the art contest i'd never had the nerve to send out anything and and the clock was ticking on that contest that you had to be a teenager so i think so i think i sent it out at the very last moment i think i was 18 or 19. um but i said but i thought i'll send a story because i had been i had taken a creative writing class and i had a story i actually sent them two stories and i always thought it was the other story that had won because i didn't i liked that one better and that but they decided it was too edgy or something so they printed the one they did and called that the winner i don't know where i came up with that idea but i there was another story i'd written that i that i thought was really good but it had a i had some violence in it and whatever i don't know what happened to that story i won't send it to you don't worry i'd love to read it i didn't find that one online no it has appeared in the offices of 17 but i think the question is that at what point did you actually think of yourself as someone who is going to be a writer as a as a real thing as a profession well that was later it wasn't it wasn't the 17 thing but of course the 17th thing you know is the beginning of something obviously i mean you know obviously i thought i'm going to stick this in an envelope and see what happens and it was the first time i did that but it was because of this crazy idea that i i wanted to enter this contest i don't know you know just kids are weird and then it was only after it was only after i had graduated from college and was working here in new york that i really thought i wanted to try to commit myself to to writing i really missed it i was working in an office i missed the life of of the artist and of the writer and i wanted to do that and i told myself i would take you know a little loan to live off of you know i was i was going up to cornell they paid the tuition but i had a little loan and um i would give myself to the age of 30. so i i just arbitrarily you know gave myself this permission and that's all that's all it is it's arbitrarily giving yourself permission but in order to do that you have to have a tremendous feeling of desire to do it because it costs you money it costs you time it costs your friends across your family your mother won't speak to you for years but you have to want to do that and then you just give yourself permission and but i did i did have that sort of deadline at the uh i made myself till i was 30. and then when i was 30 i had two books out already so i got lucky i got lucky it all happened before i was 30 but i don't know what would have happened if i i think i just would have stopped writing because of this artificial idea i mean not when i look back i think how absurd and how useful to think that 30 was old and 30 was the end and you know if you hadn't done it by 30 just find something new you know that but that's what i told myself but i think that that's what something like that has to happen for everybody and you just figure it out on your own it's kind of again it's kind of arbitrary but it's permission and that didn't happen for me until i was 23. so does that answer the question yeah yeah i've got three years all right thanks okay go ahead hello um you kind of already answered your last answer but i recently graduated with a vfa in writing and i'm kind of terrified so i was wondering if you had any advice for someone who's like what do you what are you terrified of um i'm afraid that now that i don't have i don't have to write that i'm not going to be motivated to do so at least in the past like a couple months that's sort of been true and i'm afraid that no one's going to like me but you can never write to be liked that would just forget that project that's what yeah that came out wrong sorry i mean anyone can tell you that's just not going to happen you're writing to create something that you think is is beautiful and true and interesting and that the world needs to hear a little of um be a faith fine don't be frightened it's no worse than a b.a [Laughter] if you need your it sounds like you're afraid of missing the structure of the classes that you took um yeah i am i'm also afraid because i kind of like lost that safety net that i had because all of my classmates had to move to different places and that's kind of i mean we still talk like you can still you know there are lots of like little writing classes that you can just enroll in um i did that when i was working in a law firm here after college because i was afraid of missing the classroom situation and i would just find a little class at night at the new school and i would enroll in that and you know it just it keeps the discipline if you need that kind of discipline to and structure an audience to keep you going it's helpful there are a lot of little groups like that little workshops that's i mean that's really what workshops are for for that so you'll find some and then and then you can go off to graduate school as well if you want to continue that and then by the time you don't okay i just don't want to go oh that's fine it's not a problem um but you can find a way of balancing your life where you are working to pay the rent always have another plan for for rent paying don't make writing the way you're going to pay the rent because pardon got a job so that's good all right all right and um and you're young and energetic and you can write and work at the same time you have no children right all right [Music] you're set you'll be fine thank you okay thank you uh first of all thank you very much for the many hours of pleasure reading your work it's been wonderful so nice i'm intrigued by your attraction to canadian writing i'm an american living in canada and i just wondered you're the voice of american women in a lot of fiction what what is your attraction to canadian writers i'm not surprised by it but i'm just interested to know why i don't know it might be genetic i'm a quarter canadian french canadian madison is almost canada yes well in fact i went to college at the first university that had a canadian studies program and we say when you know we sang not only the star-spangled banner but old canada you know that so and it was 30 minutes from the border that's what you should be saying oh canada instead of a black woman um i don't know i i just um i don't i i don't know is there a difference in voice between an american no i don't think so there are a lot of american writers i also love so it i just i just happened arbitrarily to sort of because she mentioned alice monroe so but i mean alice monroe's voice is would you describe her voice as a canadian voice how would you would you say it's canadian literature i mean it is it is she's she's often grappling with canadian with with canadian life but she's the standout within it her characters are the rebels within it so who knows margaret atwood very in her earlier work was very seriously taking canada on as a political subject in america as the enemy and you know trying to do that um now the enemies are larger and you know it's her her stage is larger um i don't know and of course of course michael anders came you know via sri lanka and england to canada um i don't know those were just i think those were the writers that they're they're just three stellar writers who just came to mind there are also a lot of american writers i like as well but maybe there's a north i mean i don't feel there's a canadian difference in them do you not really but maybe i would be really naive and wrong to assert that too strongly i don't know okay after reading stairs i have to ask you one very quick question did you ever play bass uh no michelle and degiac hotel could you tell no no i was convinced that you were actually a bass player my niece plays face she's a really great bass player and i know a bass player in madison and i consulted with him but um i was my my british editor in england plays bass and i said to her i said hannah could you tell i couldn't she said no i thought you played faith she said i was convinced oh good thank you good work [Laughter] hi so um i'm an mfa student so i'm gonna ask something very technical and very annoying but um i wanted to say thank you i mean this is amazing i mean i i'm a huge fan of of um of self-help i love the essays how to talk to your mother how to be the other woman i mean they are amazing amazing essays and my question is actually about a certain moment um in in the gate of the stairs and um there's a certain there's a moment where the main character jumps into the coffin of her brother and i'm wondering spoiler alert sorry if i'm ruining it for basically everybody which i probably am but um i'm wondering what what drives you when you're writing your plot is it technical is it emotional i mean i'm sure it's a combination of both but what is the overriding factor because i'm guessing i mean that is such a huge moment and i'm guessing that um i'm sort of guessing that it's not possible for somebody to jump into the coffin of of her brother and and kind of be in that space and i'm wondering what you thought of what what what did you think when you were right really i mean what did you think for me i bought it i was like yes this is what you know the character needs to do but when i was thinking of it technically i said how the heck could that be possible how could somebody do that but at that point i didn't even care so i'm wondering as a right what do you what yeah what do you do well as i was imagining the scene i i just kept imagining i i first was focused on the father and what he would say and then the father sort of leaving with the mother and then i suddenly had the whole church leaving including the organists i thought well that really wouldn't happen but this is how i was i'm imagining it so she's alone and then i just knew she would go up there i was just following her the way i imagined her i knew she would go up there and i knew she would try to sneak a peek and then no one was there of course which wouldn't again probably wouldn't really happen in real life but i just imagined her just going in and just being with him because she was very close to him she was pretty close yeah it felt right it felt like everything is my imagination of her yeah cool okay thank you thank you okay i live in seattle and we read because basically november through may it's rather scary to go outside and do anything else but um i'd love to know lori why do you think it's important currently that we read why is it important to us culture that we're reading and it's wonderful always to see how many people turn out for the new yorker festival i love coming out to this coast for it um curious to know your thoughts why is it important that we read it's important to get language that isn't commercially mediated and increasingly we don't have that it's important to sort of get close to another person's imagination um which language can lead us to and to spend time in this really distilled and intimate way that a book can bring especially a novel and it's important just for expanding your horizons and learning things it's as simple as that both emotional knowledge and just knowledge of the world you know i i sometimes think is reading a book itself of value i mean does it it doesn't matter what book as long as you're reading a book and and and i go either way on that sometimes i think no it doesn't matter if it's a bad book don't read it it's not valuable because it's a book um it would be better to spend time watching a good movie um but there are but a good book is is of value in the way that i said in terms of the language the expression of preserving a language that that is is that is communicating both on an emotional and an intellectual level and in service of a mind that is observing the world and telling us something interesting about it most language that we encounter is trying to sell us something and that's really unfortunate and it degrades the language and it degrades encounters with language but fiction writers presumably are not doing that although they're out there trying you know their publishers send them out there to tell you you know to get them to try to sell their books but so there's the commercial problem actually on my book tour i would tell people not to buy the book i'm sorry to be going like this but the light the light is coming in it's so completely dark if i don't do this so i don't really mean to be saluting you like a demented person that's okay i like the salute thank you um a couple years back i was at the new yorker festival and deborah was talking to alice monroe and the subject of that night seemed to focus on motherhood and she talked about how she was really prolific with her writing when her children were really young and she would get up early in the morning to write and i recently heard barbara kings oliver talk about that too how she has to balance family and being a writer and how during the day she shuts herself in her room and then around six or seven she has to go downstairs say goodbye to her characters and be a normal mom and normal wife and be like how was everyone else's day and so i'm wondering how you balance all of that and if you could talk a little bit about the early years when you had a baby and how you managed to find time to keep writing through that and then even now just having a teenager what that's like and being a writer too it's it's all a struggle it's you know i am not just a working mother i'm a single working mother and it's it's just all struggle and i don't i don't but thank you for acknowledging the situation i mean both men and women have it i mean i know single working dads who are also trying to write novels it's not just women but it's it's really hard there's no easy answer um you just you just do the best you can you have to you know somebody said the thing about terrorist groups that that make them survive is that they it can improvise if they come you know if you thwart them one in one direction they can find a way to improvise and that's really how you have to think you have to think like osama bin laden and you have to be a kind of terrorist i mean you have to just be so determined and when you hit that you just you'll improvise over here um not that we should at any rate if that's the downside of being a writer it's not something to be it's not something to be praised um it's but because because it's sort of a ruthless kind of determination that you have to have and it's not attractive it's not pretty it creates all kinds of guilt feelings and parents which will never go away and alice monroe is still writing about her still feelings um alice had this great memory of being at the typewriter and batting her two-year-old's hands away i know i know and you know you you'll never forget that and it feels it's hard it's hard um you just do you know it's what i tell my son just do the best you can you know that's all you can do just do the best you can and know when to forgive yourself and know when not to know when to push yourself a little more but it is very hard to balance all things i think i think people who know that they don't want to have children and don't have children are in a better place artistically writing wise in terms of the life um children will always take priority over your work they just will so it's really hard to to balance but if you're if you're a ruthless impr improvising terrorist type you can do it it's time for our last question and here's our last question okay hi hi um okay i'm also an mfa student so these are where um sarah lawrence hello first year no fiction yeah um and so i was wondering um kind of two things i wanted to know how you know when you have finished a short story and you're ready to just kind of put it out there and move on and then my second question was just um maybe for you it's more in regards to an editor but i was wondering how you went once you've shown your work to other people and they have a different take on it or they think that your character should be doing different things or they they you know want to they have ideas for changes how you know when you think it's something that is appropriate as well so that your sensibilities as an artist are um still intact versus when maybe you feel like you need to please the other people who are reading it or if you even deal with that question because what's the what's the last part of the question again i'm sorry sorry it's it's um kind of like sorting through different feedback and figuring out how to know what applies to your work and what applies to your vision yeah well i'm sure you're feeling this already as an mfa student that some people's criticism may be eloquent and beautiful and intimidating and deep down inside you just think it's wrong you just think they're wrong but that's part of what the mfa workshop will will sort of build in you it builds the tough skin you have to it causes you to sort things out but some things will come through and you'll think you know that's interesting and that's right um and you should pay attention to those but that's part of you know that's part of the writing process and the and the life of a writer that you start to do alone at the desk as well you bring your own critical faculties to your work and you say am i being too hard on myself here or is this this paragraph really lousy um and you start to to figure all that out you never get it perfect you just don't it's it's everything comes out a little less than it should be but you just keep so knowing when it's done you always think it's done and then you look at it again and realize it's not so you just keep you know at some point you have to abandon it and move on to your next story um i would say do not keep working on things that have already been published by the new yorkers when that happens because i know writers who have done that actually don't do that thank you so much [Applause] you

Channel: The New Yorker

Views: 9,319

Rating: 4.8805971 out of 5

Keywords: Festival 2010, Deborah Treisman, Lorrie Moore, laugher, festival, nyer festival

Id: CVBwm4NrdLA

Length: 84min 6sec (5046 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 22 2014