Fiction writer Lorrie Moore visits Tulane
Author Lorrie Moore, this year"s Zale-Kimmerling Writer-in-Residence, speaks in a creative writing class. “Everything we do when we sit down as writers, it feels new to us. When I write short stories each piece is a fresh start,” Moore told students during her visit at Tulane University. (Photo by Paula Burch-Celentano)
On paper Lorrie Moore is very witty, but in person she is perhaps even funnier.
“Last time I was up on a podium I talked into a reading light thinking it was a microphone,” she said dryly before she began her reading on Monday evening (March 2) in the Lavin-Bernick Center on the Tulane University uptown campus.
“It's hard to keep the world out of your story; I don't try to address today's problems but I do try to express the world as it relates to people's lives.”—Lorrie Moore, author
Moore also was a guest lecturer in two creative writing classes during her Tulane visit as this year"s Zale-Kimmerling Writer-in-Residence. Every year, the Zale-Kimmerling Program brings an esteemed woman writer to campus to meet up with both readers and student writers.
It soon became clear why the Newcomb College Institute organizers picked Moore. The minute she started reading her work you couldn"t help but be captivated. The way she read complemented her writing style. Her light voice jolted with a sigh at the end of funny lines, emphasizing the ironies and punctuating the jokes.
At the event she read a piece titled “Thank You for Having Me” from Bark, a popular collection of her short stories.
Moore is famous for her short fiction but dabbles in novel writing. She recently wrote the novel A Gate at the Stars, which was short-listed for the 2010 Orange Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award.
Her tales capture an emotion that is distinctly modern and yet uniquely comical, show what it means to be disillusioned and yet hopeful, and examine what it means to be an American in the new millennium.
“After reading a story by Lorrie Moore, you feel as if the very air around you has been cast anew,” said Tulane undergraduate Stephanie Chen in her speech welcoming Moore to the university.
“Once a reader told me my piece was about loneliness and I was like ⦠really?!” Moore said. “But you know what, she was right. That"s the great thing about writing everyone"s gonna get something different from your piece.”
Claire Davenport is a first-year student at Tulane University, majoring in English and political science.
