Week 2

Class Ground Rules

• Read all the assignments before class.

• Keep yourself on mute unless called on.

• Raise your hands electronically.

• Focus your comments only on the question at hand rather than straying to other parts of the story.

• Refrain from offering a review of the whole story or jumping to the end.

• Try to support your comments by referring to details from the text.

• Listen to and respond to others with respect.

Lorrie Moore on the Relationship Between Her Fiction and Her Life

As for the relationship of my fictional characters to me, their author, I suppose it would depend on which characters you mean. Each has a slightly different relationship, I believe—I hope. I assume you mostly mean the protagonists, who sometimes have the burden of having a couple of things in common with me and sometimes don’t. I’m never writing autobiography—I would be bored, the reader would be bored, the writing would be nowhere. One has to imagine, one has to create (exaggerate, lie, fabricate from whole cloth and patch together from remnants), or the thing will not come alive as art. Of course, what one is interested in writing about often comes from what one has remarked in one’s immediate world or what one has experienced oneself or perhaps what one’s friends have experienced. But one takes these observations, feelings, memories, anecdotes—whatever—and goes on an imaginative journey with them. What one hopes to do in that journey is to imagine deeply and well and thereby somehow both gather and mine the best stuff of the world. A story is a kind of biopsy of human life. A story is both local, specific, small, and deep, in a kind of penetrating, layered, and revealing way. Perhaps it’s even diagnostic, though now I’ve got to lose this completely repellent medical imagery. —from an interview in The Paris Review, Spring-Summer 2001.

It was fiction. It is autobiographical, but it's not straddling a line. Things did not happen exactly that way; I re-imagined everything. And that's what fiction does. Fiction can come from real-life events and still be fiction. It can still have that connection, that germ. It came from something that happened to you. That doesn't mean it's straddling a line between nonfiction and fiction. And the whole narrative strategy is obviously fictional. It's not a nonfiction narrative strategy. —from an interview in Salon, December 7, 1998.

I do think that the proper relationship of a writer to his or her own life is similar to a cook with a cupboard. What the cook makes from what's in the cupboard is not the same thing as what's in the cupboard—and, of course, everyone understands that....None—or at least very few—of the things that have happened to my characters have ever happened to me. But one's life is there regardless—in emotional ways. I often think of a writing student I had once who was blind. He never once wrote about a blind person—never wrote about blindness at all. But he wrote about characters who constantly bumped into things, who tripped, who got bruised; and that seemed to me a true and characteristic transformation of life into art. He wanted to imagine a person other than himself; but his journey toward that person was paradoxically and necessarily through his own life. Like a parent with children, he gave his characters a little of what he knew—but not everything. He nurtured rather than replicated or transcribed. —"On Writing," from See What Can Be Done: Essays, Criticism, and Commentary, 2018.