I just finished reading Lisa Moore’s Degrees of Nakedness, for the second time. These twelve stories make up her first collection of short fiction.
Fucking hell. My tenth book won’t be half as good. Moore’s attention to the idiosyncratic details of her character’s lives bring contemporary Newfoundland into razor sharp, often painful, usually hilarious, focus.
Steven Heighton, in his classic book of notes on writing, Work Book:
“On reading an excellent writer… two vying urges: to go and write, and to give up writing.”
Moore’s easy-to-access style and straight forward prose never fails to make me think, “I could do that! I’m going to go do that right now!”
Thirty minutes later I snap out of my trance, look down at the blinking cursor of an empty document, and silently shut the laptop.
Suddenly aware that… Nope, I can’t do it.
But then, I think of Ron Carlson in Ron Carlson Writes a Short Story
“The single largest advantage the veteran writer has… is his tolerance for not knowing. It’s not style, skill, or any other dexterity. An experienced writer has been in those woods before and is willing to be lost; she knows that being lost is necessary for the discoveries to come.”
Seems serendipitous that I happened upon this sticky note attached to a book shelf in the library today:
