Q&A with Dinty W. Moore
by Liv Lansdale
LL:
I often find myself thinking of creative nonfiction as a less imaginative genre, though plenty of essayists and op-ed writers insist otherwise. Could you discuss the role imagination plays in your writing?
DWM:
There are two ways imagination comes into play with creative nonfiction. The first is simply that the writer can imagine all she wants in an essay, as long as the border between observed truth and imagined truth is acknowledged. So for instance, a memoir essay might contain the sentence “I have no idea where my sister disappeared to that cold December afternoon, and she has never told me, but I’ve always thought perhaps she went to see our Aunt Molly to ask about cousin Mike’s death….” 
The second and more significant way that imagination comes into play is that a creative nonfiction writer must create the form, shape, language, metaphor, and rhythm of the essay. We are not all photo-realists. So just like a painter must use aesthetic imagination to decide how to paint an apple (think O’Keeffe, think Picasso, think Seurat), a writer of literary nonfiction—nonfiction that is an art form not just informational—has to invent the way in which the story is told, and then apply each brushstroke within the greater frame. Arranging an artistic presentation of sentences that are based in fact and arranging an artistic presentation of sentences that are based in fiction takes a great amount of imagination and vision either way.
LL:
Much of your writing is autobiographical. Even when you write about historical figures in Between Panic & Desire, you cover them through the lens of the self. If you had to write about anyone, for lack of a better term, impersonally, who would you choose?
DWM:
You are exactly right: I don’t write about historical figures in the memoir since I know so little “real” information about Richard M. Nixon, John F. Kennedy, or Charles Manson. I write about the filtered and skewed image of these men that came through the television set when I was five, ten, or sixteen year old. A true writer of biography, if they don’t have access to the subject, does painstaking research in order to come to “know” Thomas Jefferson or Indira Gandhi. That’s an art form all of its own. My writing about Manson and Nixon is all about my understanding and misunderstanding, not an attempt to capture the truth of these people.
But to answer your second question, if I were to do a serious biography—impersonally—I would love to tackle Howard Hawks, the filmmaker, or Raymond Chandler, the writer.
LL:
Many MFA programs consider creative nonfiction a relatively recent genre, in spite of writers as varied as E. B. White, Montaigne, Thoreau, St. Augustine, and countless others. Do you think there was a Golden Age of CNF? With all that's being published now, could it be possible we are living in one today?
DWM:
The Golden Age of the Essay seemed to start the moment Montaigne named the form and extend for a few hundred years afterwards. The Golden Age of Literary Nonfiction—magazine writing with the power, style, and punch of the best literary fiction, as practiced by Didion, Wolfe, Mailer, and Plimpton—came in the 1960s and 70s. The Golden Age of CNF is maybe here, maybe still coming. The term itself, “creative nonfiction,” is still only about twenty-five years old. I’m guessing we are going to see a lot of innovation in the form, especially as new reading technologies come into play.
LL:
I've heard it said of fiction that subject matter is practically irrelevant next to the skill with which the story is told. Could this apply to CNF, or is some content just too dull to entertain?
DWM:
Some think Proust was a memoirist—he just didn’t have a name for it. Meticulously crafted, carefully observed, language-rich prose will always win the day, even if the subject matter is a moth flitting about a room.
LL:
What were your Bad Writer Tendencies when you began writing? Do you struggle with the same ones, or have new batches cropped up? Alternatively, which aspects of your writing have improved the most?
DWM:
The answer is the same for your first and third question. My bad writer tendency in the beginning was to write mundane, weak early drafts and either become discouraged and quit or, on occasion, publish the weak drafts and hope no one noticed. Everything I wrote and published in my twenties is embarrassing to me now, though I don’t lose any sleep over it. To the best of my knowledge, no one but me bothered to save any copies.
What has improved is both my ability to shrug off a lousy early draft and my willingness to revise thirty or forty times in order to shape the story and sharpen the language.
LL:
According to Socrates in Plato's "Phaedrus," King Thamus of Thebes once claimed that the art of writing "will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own." Today, I often hear cultural commentators discuss the increasing replacement of verbal communication with text and images characteristic of this digital age (think of Facebook's ubiquitous "pics or it didn't happen”). Like Thamus, they worry that this transition discourages introversion and hinders insight.
The question for you as a writer is, do you ever feel that the narrativizing necessary to writing distorts your actual memory, or unintentionally twists the truth in any way? If so, is it any different from when you tell a story verbally? And would you consider writing's incidental truth-twisting a pleasure or a source of frustration?
DWM:
Wow! That’s some sort of question. I’ve heard, similarly, that younger students no longer feel the need to memorize facts, since Google has it all available at the touch of a phone. I’m sure some cave cynic bemoaned the invention of the wheel. Pretty soon, we would forget how to lift chunks of Wooly Mammoth onto our backs—rolling carts made it all too easy!
Memory is distorted from the get go, of course, and gets worse with every year, every retelling. All a nonfiction writer can do is share her honest memories, warts and all. We make no claim to absolute truth. But yes, to the heart of your question, I suppose writing down a memory can suggest more legitimacy, harden it a little into stone. Suddenly the memory is not morphing as usual but is pinned down a bit at the edges. This seems an inescapable result, but not something to fret about. When I write, fully aware that my memory is subjective, I find it pleasurable to try to come as close to accuracy as possible.
Dinty W. Moore is author of numerous books, including The Mindful Writer: Noble Truths of the Writing Life, Crafting the Personal Essay: A Guide for Writing and Publishing Creative Nonfiction, and the memoir Between Panic & Desire, winner of the Grub Street Nonfiction Book Prize. He recently edited THE ROSE METAL PRESS FIELD GUIDE TO WRITING FLASH NONFICTION: Advice and Essential Exercises from Respected Writers, Editors, and Teachers.
Having failed as a zookeeper, modern dancer, Greenwich Village waiter, filmmaker, and wire service journalist, he now writes essays and stories. He has been published in The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, Harpers, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, Gettysburg Review, Utne Reader, and Crazyhorse, among numerous other venues.
Dinty lives in Athens, Ohio, the funkadelicious, hillbilly-hippie Appalachian epicenter of the locally-grown, locally-consumed, goats-are-for-cheese, paw-paws-are-for-eatin’, artisanal-salsa, our-farmers-market-rocks-the-hills sub-culture, where he grows his own heirloom tomatoes and edible dandelions, and teaches a crop of brilliant undergraduate and stunningly talented graduate students as director of Ohio University’s BA, MA, and PhD in Creative Writing program.
Thanks for the interview with Dinty! He’s a wonderful source of writing information and inspiration for those of us who love Creative Nonfiction.
By Louise Julig on Sep 24 2013