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B orn in St. John's, Newfoundland in 1964, Lisa Moore grew up on the outskirts of the city. Initially aspiring to be a painter, Moore moved to Halifax to pursue studies in the visual arts at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. After graduating, Moore returned to Newfoundland to study creative writing at Memorial University and found her stride in writing short stories. Crucial to Moore's apprenticeship as a writer was a creative writing course at Memorial taught by Lawrence Mathews. The class continued to meet after the end of the course and evolved into The Burning Rock writer's collective, a group that includes Michael Winter, Claire Wilkshire, and Ramona Dearing. After publishing a collection of short stories titled Degrees of Nakedness in 1995, Moore garnered much acclaim for her short-story collection Open (2002), which was nominated for the Winterset Award and the Giller Prize and won the Canadian Authors' Association Prize for short fiction. Moore published her first novel, Alligator, in 2005. A panoramic view of an ensemble cast of beleaguered characters in contemporary St. John's, the novel was nominated for the Giller Prize and won the Commonwealth Prize (Canada and Caribbean region) for 2006. Moore has also edited The Penguin Book of Contemporary Short Stories by Canadian Women (2006) and has written columns for The National Post and The Globe and Mail. Lisa Moore currently lives in St. John's with her husband and two children. We talked at Acadia University in Wolfville in January of 2007.

HW: Anybody who reads Canadian literature can't help but be struck by the volume of fine writing that has come out of Newfoundland in the last couple of decades - Wayne Johnston, Michael Crummey, Mary Dalton, Donna Morrissey, Robert Chafe, Michael Winter, Ramona Dearing, Kenneth J. Harvey, Joan Clark, Bernice Morgan, Edward Riche, John Steffler, etc., etc., etc. The list is exhausting before it's exhaustive, and that says a lot about the kind of company you're in. Is there any way - at least to a degree - to explain why there has been this conspicuous surge in Newfoundland literature?

LM:   I know that at a certain point Newfoundland authors started to look for audiences abroad. This was happening at a time when writing from the periphery all over the world was suddenly stepping into the limelight. There was a time when it was very hard to get your hands on contemporary African literature or Chinese literature or Indian literature or Icelandic literature. It is still hard. But I can remember in my twenties reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez for the first time and recognizing how new that voice felt. I also had the sense that it probably came from a long tradition of writing that I had never had access to before. Magic realism was not "new," just new to me. When I was a very young child I believed that my city library had every book ever written. It was only a question of asking for it. I was shocked the first time I asked for a book and discovered the library didn't have it. I had a similar experience later in life when I realized the limitations of distribution had a lot to do with what I read and didn't read. I went to Australia and learned about a lot of great Australian authors I'd never heard of before because they had not sold rights in North America and were not distributed here. If you've never heard the author's name you can't order the book from Amazon. As a result the landscapes you read about in fiction are still mostly British landscapes or American landscapes, certain Canadian landscapes. I think people crave new landscapes in literature, and Newfoundland writers provided such a landscape at the right moment.

HW:   Part of that current proliferation of writing in Newfoundland, as you suggested, is a kind of increased bilateral interest, in the sense that now Newfoundland writers are interested in getting published on the mainland, and readers on the mainland are finally paying attention to what is going on in Newfoundland.

LM:   Yes. In the 1970s there was a whole cultural renaissance in Newfoundland, and a lot of that happened in theatre, with the Mummers and then Codco speaking about Newfoundland culture and taking those very political, dark and biting plays to Britain and to Canada and all over the world - and they were innovative in form as well, because they were collective. So the whole idea of Newfoundland culture as being something rich and something to be celebrated started happening around the 1970s. The folklore department at Memorial University was in its prime and people were going out into the outports and collecting old songs and old melodies, capturing that stuff knowing that it was in jeopardy of being lost because suddenly there were roads, and there were televisions, because of the Smallwood government's resettlement program. That kind of culture - the passing down of oral stories and songs, kitchen parties where music was shared - all that sort of thing was on the way out, and people realized how precious it was and began to celebrate it. I'm not quite sure why the art of writing suddenly came to the fore after all of that happened, but it felt like we had a solid ground to stand on.

HW:   So it had in a way to do with both a shift in the logistics of writing, but also a consciousness of a strong cultural foundation coupled with an awareness of how that foundation was perhaps fading away.

LM:   And also how it was unique.

I can remember when I was about ten years old, I took art classes at 77 Bond Street which was a part of Memorial University's extension program, and at this time the visual artist Don Wright had been going out onto the beach and picking up devil's purses and lobster pots and that kind of thing and incorporating what was really refuse into high art, which helped create an awareness that the material world was worthy of speaking about and describing. Gerry Squires' landscape painting also made a big impact; having landscapes that you were familiar with and that were particular to your experience celebrated all over Canada made it possible to think about being an artist.

HW:   You credit the Burning Rock writer's collective in St. John's as having played an important and sustaining role in your career. Can you talk a little bit about that group and what it has meant to you as a writer?

LM:   I think we were really lucky in that class because there were very, very strong writers in what I think was the first creative writing class that Larry Matthews taught at Memorial. Michael Winter was in the class, Mary Lewis, who's a filmmaker, myself, Claire Wilkshire, Larry himself. And after the class we kept meeting, and other people joined. It was a unique group in that the level of criticism was just very sophisticated. We were excited about listening to each other's work, and Larry really got us thinking about how important innovation was and also of course about editing and being able to stand behind every word you put on the page. One advantage is that we are looking for the same sorts of things when we read; we are close enough as friends to understand what each of us is going after, driving toward. So the criticism can be very helpful, because it respects that, but also forces us to be careful in a certain kind of way.

HW:   So it's a very constructive but also nurturing environment, in which you are open about saying what you want to say about each other's work, but in a way that is mutually sustaining.

LM:   I think so. At different times in our history as writers, we sometimes draw away from the group. You know, you need a little bit of time to just be alone with your material; I think each of us has felt that over the years. But I find the group very helpful. We read aloud to each other, and when we meet we haven't read the work in advance. I think a listener is much more impatient than a reader, so when you are reading your work to others you are feeling your listener grow bored, you're feeling where the rhythm of the sentence is off. Later we share work that is written and do closer edits and that kind of thing, and we've read and given feedback on each other's novels or the whole collections, but that first initial reading is a strenuous thing to go through as a writer, because of pacing, and because of rhythm and because of timing in a work. All of that becomes apparent as you read fresh material to listeners.

HW:   I'm really interested in what I would call the cultural moment in Newfoundland around your work and Wayne Johnston's work, Michael Winter's work, Ed Riche's work. A huge part of the literary tradition in Newfoundland has been a grappling with the experience of rural Newfoundland, particularly the outports. I'm thinking of the work of somebody like E.J. Pratt, or Michael Cook, or Harold Horwood, and, in some ways, some of the contemporary writing, like Johnston's or Michael Crummey's, say. But that world seems conspicuously remote in your fiction. Indeed, you've described yourself in an interview as a "post-television townie" (I kind of like that phrase).1 Do you have any thoughts on the implications of that shift in milieu?

LM:   I never had the thought, "Oh, I'll write about Newfoundland." I wanted to write about what it felt like to be jealous, what it felt like to be in love, what it felt like to lose your virginity, what it felt like to have a child. Those were the things I wanted to write about, and my experience happens to be Newfoundland. And what we think of as Newfoundland - those kitchen parties and that rich musical history and storytelling and folklore, all of that - is changing all the time, in flux and being modernized, as I guess those sorts of cultures are all over the world. So it's hard to know what kind of a Newfoundland will come out of my books, as I'm sure Dostoyevsky had no idea what kind of Russia was going to come out of his books, nor did he probably think of it. But for many of us, the Russia that we know begins with Dostoyevsky (I just say Russia because I've never been there), and Montreal to me for a long time was Mordecai Richler's Montreal. I think writers are to varying degrees interested in capturing place, but I think mostly we are interested in capturing emotion, and the senses, and moral ambiguities, and moral failings, and moral conflicts.

HW:   On the other hand, that traditional heritage of Newfoundland has a certain presence on the outskirts, if you will, of your fiction, and on many occasions, it's rendered at this interesting and often ironic distance. I'm thinking of how, in Alligator, the filmmaker Madeleine is obsessed with aestheticizing the fanatical Archbishop Fleming's "brute desire to colonize the [Southern] shore with Catholics, to have bells clanging in the grey sodden skies all over the island." There is another wonderful moment in Alligator, in which Frank, the central character who owns a hotdog stand in downtown St. John's, envies this guy who has concocted a tourist attraction called "the Haunted Walk," which involves taking visitors on a tour of the sites of all these horrible murders in St. John's, or the way they have gussied up George Street in St. John's to make it look "like drinking was a Newfoundland tradition." So that heritage is there, but it remains at an interesting remove.

LM:   Well, I'm a writer, so I'm interested in the production of culture, so I'm going to be commenting on it, and I happen to live in Newfoundland, so I'm going to be commenting on the production of culture in Newfoundland. And it has certainly been commodified in the last forty years, I guess; it's been branded. That is a new thing, a different thing than what happened in the 1970s, which was a celebration of culture. I think the commodification of that culture is an anaesthetizing impulse. As soon as you begin to put up fake lamps on George Street, you're destroying that culture. There is no way to produce a culture self-consciously.

HW:   It's a kind of ossification. You're just fixing it in amber and rendering it lifeless or ersatz.

LM:   Yes, but it's also about trying to turn it into a product that can be sold, and sold easily, and digested easily. I think real literature is always the fight against that desire to make culture easy to digest.

HW:   On that note, actually, I detect in Alligator a certain skeptical attitude toward tourism. Not only are there the Haunted Walk and the fake lamps on George Street, but Colleen's mother Beverly is described at work listening to the activity of the rest of her department, "all the burgeoning, insipid vitality of the tourism sector where she had worked for the last twenty years." And throughout the novel there is a gargantuan cruise ship in the harbour, a kind of hulking symbolic presence. What do you think about the role of tourism in relation to this commodifying of culture?

LM:   I guess tourism is an easy strawman, especially cultural tourism - there is a self-consciousness at the heart of it that begs to be parodied. There is something always elusive about real art, something that slips the noose of commodification. By the time the Department of Tourism has pinned culture down it has already morphed into something else. It's this elusive authenticity that real travelers (as opposed to tourists, who are a different breed) are after. It has to do with the mode of reception probably. Real travelers want to make their own experiences, they are willing to recognize the beauty in discomfort, the rough-hewn, the excitement in the unexpected; tourists want cultural experiences delivered ready-made.

HW:   That's another part of what interests me in this cultural moment in Newfoundland. It seems that on the one hand there is this incredible and welcome popularity, if you will - that is, people are really interested in Newfoundland and Newfoundland culture - but on the other hand, in our present consumerist society that brings with it these commodifying pressures that in some ways have a deflating effect, because they cultivate the kind of reaction that you are describing, this anxiety about cultural production.

LM:   Yes, but you know writing is such an isolated experience. You spend so much time alone, years alone, if you added up all the hours [laughs], and I think that the nature of the act gives you distance from that kind of commodification. There is time to distance yourself from the concerns of the market. Other concerns take over, aesthetic concerns, the concern for unity.

HW:   I want to come back to the notion of place, which you mentioned in describing how the priority for you as a writer is to capture the texture of an emotion or the texture of an experience, such as having a baby or being jealous. Your characters for the most part inhabit a suburban or urban, middle-class environment that is arguably familiar to readers all across the continent, and yet at the same time your narratives are grounded in a very detailed and vivid local geography. One reviewer described the stories in Open as "site-specific without being regionally strait-jacketed,"2 which I thought was a very nice and apt description of the kind of balance that you strike in your work. Does that balance come easily enough? That is, is it just a reflection of the milieu that you inhabit and that you write about, or does it require a certain effort to strike that balance?

LM:   The way I strike that balance is to not think about it, and if I catch myself thinking about it, I make an effort not to think about it. You know, all of my characters travel, and I travel a lot, and I'm interested in the way that people from a place like Newfoundland do go all over the world. That is part of the site-specificity, the fact that we aren't site-specific, that everybody goes and comes back. For many, many Newfoundlanders, that is really what it means to be a Newfoundlander. So if I am to write about being a Newfoundlander in the book that I'm working on, travel, movement is a big part of that.

HW:   That is a theme that definitely comes up in review after review, that your characters are very cosmopolitan, and often there is kind of an implicit surprise at that: "What? This is writing about Newfoundland? But these characters are very cosmopolitan!" At the same time, you could also say that Newfoundland in a lot of ways has long been a cosmopolitan place, because of its position on the continent, because of the status of St. John's as a port, and so on and so forth.

LM:   That's right. I remember that when I started going downtown at fifteen, sixteen years old for a coffee or whatever, walking along Water Street, you would run into groups of sailors, and they'd be Cuban, or they'd be Russian or they'd be Japanese, but they would be sailors. It was a very heterogeneous culture when I was sixteen, seventeen. I think it's changing now, but there were people coming in all the time and leaving.

HW:   I see the opening of "Nipple of Paradise" - the first story of your first collection of stories, Degrees of Nakedness - as being a kind of annunciation, because there are some striking images right at the outset in that story that, to my mind anyway, serve as apt descriptions of your style. Your narrator Donna suggests that a story should work like a "Chinese ribbon dance. They turn off the lights so you can't see the dancer. All you see are two long fluorescent ribbons, drawing in the dark." For me that image captures something of the distinctiveness of the way you write - these shimmering strokes of light and colour, behind which moves a larger story, invisible but still present. I'm not asking you whether that was your intention in the story so much as inviting you to reflect on your aesthetic, that sense that your work characteristically presents a very selective, impressionistic and vivid view of the world.

LM:   I think that everybody experiences the world through the senses, and our emotions are really tied to the senses, so that when we experience a flash of emotion, it is because of the sounds and smells and colours and textures around us, and it's often not a conscious putting together of the information before us and coming to a conclusion that, say, we feel sad now. Rather, it's a sensory experience of the world. And I want to write sensory experiences and allow the reader to decide what they mean emotionally. I'm very interested in letting the reader create the story as much as possible, because I think that is where the pleasure of reading comes from. It's the leaping the reader does. It's similar to the pleasure that comes from figuring out puzzles. The reader is creating the images all on his or her own. It's not necessarily the way I, the writer, imagined it, but I don't care if they're imagining what I'm imagining. I just want them to be imagining. That's the magic of literature for me, to allow the reader to create his or her own picture. That is what interests me. The less control I have over the picture, the more exciting it is for the reader.

HW:   And probably the more vivid. It is very different from a more expository description of, say, a state of mind: "So-and-so was thinking or experiencing such-and-such."

LM:   I also want to say that it's not just the sensual creation that the reader comes up with, but it's also forcing readers, through the layering of all those images and sensations, to make some sort of moral choice that, in their imaginations, they might not have come to before. And I don't care if it's the same choice I would have made; it's just the act of choosing that I think is interesting, to force readers into the act of choosing.

HW:   It seems to be a more immediate and experiential way of putting the reader, not necessarily in your shoes, but in shoes of some sort, as opposed to experiencing something at a remove. So, as you say, that experience might be different, but it's going to be an experience, and it's going to be vivid.

To come at this issue of aesthetics in a slightly different way, a recurring theme in reviews of your work is that your style is fairly demanding, in the sense that it requires more careful and engaged attention than that of, well, your garden-variety writer. This is not necessarily a criticism as it comes up in the reviews, but at times it has been, and it points to a central aesthetic issue in the critical reception of your work. One reviewer wrote of Degrees of Nakedness, for instance, that it is characteristic of a type of fiction that cultivates "the impression that literary fiction is only for the chosen."3 Now, I don't agree with that conclusion at all, but at the same time I will confess that it is not far off the initial impression I formed the very first time I read a Lisa Moore story, almost a decade ago (and fortunately since then I have seen the error of my ways).

LM:   Um. You know, I write the way I experience the world. There is no other way I can do it. That is the way I experience the world. I certainly don't write that way to obfuscate …

HW:   … or consciously make the reader pull up his or her socks.

LM:   No. Of course most people who don't like the work don't come up and tell you, but it's surprising how many people - I'm not talking about critics, I'm talking about the average reader - who are not particularly educated in literary fiction, who are nurses or teachers or civil servants - people who have given their lives to other forms of work, and have read my stuff and it has resonated with them. I think it depends on how much time you are willing to give a work - if you are interested in reading a page, and it takes you a year to read the book, or if you only read the page, and that's it, but it was enjoyable. When you are in the literary world, there are all kinds of pressures to read quickly.

I remember arguing with a literary critic once about a certain book that he found too demanding, too "difficult," and eventually the critic admitted that he didn't have the time to give to the book, that he had so many books to get through that month so he could review them. This notion of getting through a book, or getting a book "done" so you can move on to the next book and get that "done" is deeply depressing to me. I see reading as an anarchic pleasure. It should be without stricture, without restraint of any sort, certainly there should be no sense of responsibility to finish a book. Reading fiction should be a very private and profound freedom. As long as the page is opening the imagination and the senses and challenging thought, what difference does it make if it takes ten years or ten minutes? What gives pleasure when we read is the unexpected; you cannot read the unexpected quickly or easily because it changes you. I want to be changed when I read.

HW:   I remember that one reviewer described your work as "not skimmable,"4 which I thought was good advice.

LM:   At the same time, especially as I mature as a writer, I like the idea of recognizing the fact that there is such thing as rhythm in a story, and leaving room to breathe for the reader. I'm never going to sit down and say "Geez, I think I'll write an easy story for someone to read now." Nor would I say, "I think I'll write a hard story." But the things I'm interested in are actually hard to think about. I'm interested in time, and what time is, and how it's elastic, and why sometimes we experience a winter in the snap of a finger and sometimes it feels like twenty years, and how that connects with emotions. I'm interested in memory and I'm interested in the fact that there are things that we remember with our senses, and other things, important things, that we have no recollection of. I'm interested in how, if I pick up a coffee in a café, a whole year or two of flashes of imagery might go through my head and be completely forgotten by the time I put the cup down again. Those are the things that excite me about fiction, and I'm not in a hurry to tell those things quickly. There is no need to tell a story quickly. The writers that impress me most are the ones who have a surety. You know, you read the first line - I'm thinking of Richard Ford or Michael Ondaatje, very different writers, but still … or Eudora Welty, or Flannery O'Connor - and you just sigh, breathe out, because you realize, "Oh, I'm okay. Anything that happens here, I'm going to be fine."

HW:   You're in good hands.

LM:   Yes, you're in good hands. But you don't think "Geez, how long is it going to take them to tell this story?" [laughs] because on the level of the sentence it's interesting. Why write a sentence that has some uninteresting words in it? Why would anyone do that?

HW:   Going back to the emphasis on the sensory in your work, Everything is Illuminated is the title of a novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, but it also strikes me that it would serve very well as the unofficial motto of your fiction, because there are so many scenes in your stories, in your novel Alligator, that are just irradiated with light, in which the ordinary objects of mundane existence are suffused with this glow. Some stories I pretty much have to put on my sunglasses to read. I know that you studied painting at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, so I'm tempted to ask whether in some ways you are continuing your career as a painter by other means.

LM:   The act of painting makes you think about light in a very complex and deep way. You really want to understand what's happening to an object when light falls on it. I recently wrote a piece about David Blackwood's work, and you know we're really trained to think of light and darkness in terms of good and evil, but I think in Blackwood's prints it is more about hope than despair. For me, light has those kinds of resonances.

HW:   How about when it comes to writing a narrative? Because one of the things that strikes me about your work is how collage-like it is. I realize that that is a fairly rudimentary term, but what I mean is that your narratives evolve almost spatially, as opposed to linearly or chronologically.

LM:   Writing is a redemptive act, because we glean from experience some sort of meaning when we write, and so we're always reflecting, which is another reason to talk about light in fiction, because there is kind of a connection between reflection and light. But I think when we come to know the meaning of experience - those moments in life (I don't want to use the word epiphany, because I don't mean an epiphanic moment, I mean a series of epiphanic moments) when the meaning of the last ten years or two hours hits us, so that it has some kind of unity - it comes to us at once. There is an at-onceness about it, but at the same time it is the pulling together of a series of shards of information. There is a duality there; there are the parts and the whole.

HW:   So there is a kind of summary effect in which, for instance, a character might realize all in one fell swoop after many, many years that a marriage is unsatisfactory, or somebody who has spent a lot of time with somebody else will conclude, in just one twist of the moment, that that person is an asshole, just like that.

LM:   But they don't conclude that in a linear fashion. They don't sit down and say, "Well now, I remember ten years ago he did this, then five years ago he did that, and just yesterday he did this, so he must be an asshole." Instead they go [sharp intake of breath] "He's an asshole," and all of his assholeness comes flying at them.

HW:   That's what I mean. It has perhaps all been there in a state of potentiality, shall we say, but not necessarily available to conscious awareness.

LM:   [Laughing]. I don't actually know how it works at all. I don't know why I write the way I do. I just sense that this is the way we come to meaning, or this is the way I do.

HW:   At the same time, I can't help but make a connection between your background and interest in painting, and the very visual and spatial qualities of the way your narratives are arranged and how they develop.

LM:   I spent a lot of time thinking about abstract expressionist painting when I was in school, and when you think of the work of Jackson Pollock, those splashes all over the canvas are all over the canvas. There is no singular, single space on the canvas that has a hierarchy of meaning; there is no one splash that draws your eye to the left, and then another splash that draws your eye to the right. Your eye accepts the whole canvas at once. It's a smack. You get the meaning of the work, all of it, at once. There is no linear movement in that painting, and I'm interested in that in terms of writing as well.

HW:   I don't know if it's fair for me to invite you to articulate your own aesthetic, but I think that in some ways you just did. I'm sure the experience of reading a Lisa Moore story is different for different people, but to my mind what you just described is part of what distinguishes the experience of reading a Lisa Moore story from narratives that are more linear, teleological and cumulative. Your characters are routinely fractured or fraying, stretching at the seams. Reading your fiction I'm reminded of the title of a Pedro Almodovar film, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. If your fiction had credits like at the end of a film, a lot of your characters could have the title, "woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown." Any thoughts on why this seems to be a default state in your fiction?

LM:   Well, there has to be peril or there is nothing interesting going on.

HW:   Of course, as the old saying goes, fiction needs conflict to advance, but it does seem that many, perhaps most, of your characters are teetering on the precipice of disaster.

LM:   Well, the story "Craving" in Open, for example, just involves a group of women and their husbands getting together. Nothing really bad happens in that story. The husband of one of the women has an affair and the wife decides that love is about being open and being vulnerable. It isn't that bad. It's life. In "Craving," one of the characters has a line something like that. One of the women asks, "Why should we let our friend be overwhelmed by the crushing wave that is about to engulf her?" and another character says "It's life. Why not?" The crushing wave about to engulf their friend is the realization that her marriage might fail. It's not an axe murder or a death by heroin overdose or a transport truck somersaulting off a collapsing bridge into the river below, not even the actual failing of the marriage - but because these characters are experiencing the evening so vividly (they are slightly stoned), for those characters it has, I think, an emotional potency, however brief. It's about truly feeling our lives while they are happening. So a lot of the disaster is of the moment. Alligator definitely has very dark themes, darker than the stories.

HW:   All the characters, in a way, have their heads in the mouth of the alligator. That's one way I read that title. It's not that they are courting disaster necessarily, though somebody like Colleen, a teenager who tries to commit an act of eco-terrorism, is, but in other cases, disaster comes looking for them, as is the case with Frank, who is being shaken down by the Russian Valentin and is threatened with losing his lucrative hotdog stand, which he has worked so hard to establish.

LM:   Yes, and Frank is of a completely different socioeconomic background than Colleen, and he is vulnerable, and that is where the disaster comes from.

HW:   The milieu of your fiction is principally a relatively affluent and mobile middle class one, but every once in a while - and I think this is more the case with Alligator just because of the central presence of Frank - there is this strong sense of class distinction. I'm thinking also of when Colleen, as a kind of moral restitution for her act of eco-terrorism, is required to help paint a mural, and is confronted by her old junior high school nemesis, who is quite clearly of a lower socioeconomic class. To what degree and in what way do those differences speak to you and make you want to tackle them in your fiction?

LM:   Well I live in downtown St. John's, and it is a very diverse socioeconomic neighborhood. There are people on welfare and there are the extremely rich, and there are artists, and the kids are all in school together, so that kind of diversity characterizes the neighborhood. Also, the characters in Open and Degrees of Nakedness are very young, and a lot of young people - people in their twenties and thirties - are poor. They don't have a lot of money in the bank.

HW:   Yes, that's true. Madeleine, too, in Alligator, is doing a lot of traveling when she is young with her husband and they're poor. But they aren't poor in the same way as Frank, somebody who is scrabbling to make a living and more importantly is conscious of his destiny as grounded in his socioeconomic class, that because of his station in life, as it were, something is going to happen to him eventually, and something does, in the form of Valentin.

LM:   When you add up what happens to Frank, he's definitely a victim, but he is also the character who is the most uncompromised in the novel. He does not compromise himself in any way. He is the hero of the novel.

HW:   Yes, he has the most integrity all the way through.

One thing I noticed in reading your fiction is that there is a palpable sense of mourning in it. Now, I don't mean that it has a mournful tone - far from it - but so many characters are in mourning in one way or another. Sometimes that mourning is quite immediate - characters like Valentin, Frank, and Colleen in Alligator, the mother and daughter in "The Stylist," and the narrator of "Sea Urchin," for instance, are in mourning for lost parents - but just as often it is a mourning for a lapsed relationship - say, Madeleine's continuing obsession with her failed marriage in Alligator. Is that accurate, and if so, does that say something about you or about how you see the world?

LM:   My father died suddenly, without warning, when I was sixteen. I adored my father in every way, and his sudden death completely changed my life, all I thought I understood about the nature of life and of time and of love and security, the physical and spiritual, all the things I had taken for granted, never questioned, were suddenly thrown into question. Nothing could be depended on. I could not believe how blunt and irrevocable death was. I couldn't accept it. And in some ways, I guess, all of literature is an argument against death. Every story written down retrieves something from being lost. Time can be hoodwinked, given the slip. When you lose someone central to your life, early on, you become aware of finitude in a strange way, you get up close and personal with the idea that all of this will not last, nothing is certain, and it's an awareness that's hard to shake. The up side is that sometimes you are able to recognize how precious everything is and that it's important to experience it, to really experience it with all your senses, while you have the chance. Life is designed to whip past without being noticed. It seems to be constructed that way. Like the critic who felt he had too much to read, so much that he had to skim. He could not allow himself to experience a "slower" text. He didn't have time. Literature is a doubling back, it is reflection; as such, it kind of stops time. Hopefully. I'm putting my eggs in that basket anyway. Here is a paragraph in the novel I am writing now: "The present always has the past dissolving in it. That's the enigma of the present. The past has already infiltrated it; set up camp, deployed soldiers with toothbrushes to scrub away all of the now and the more you thought about it the faster everything dissolved." So even in the present there is a palpable sense of loss. And that's why, I think (who knows?) I am obsessed with loss. The enigma of time, and the fact that it appears, always, to be passing.

HW:   Another presence in your fiction is a feeling of lurking violence, which perhaps with the exception of Valentin - who does some brutal things over the course of Alligator - hovers just on the edge of quite a few of your narratives. I am thinking for instance of the woman whose lesbian partner terrorizes her and demolishes their home in "Degrees of Nakedness," Anna and her son getting caught in the middle of a corner-store hold-up in "Natural Parents," and a number of stories in which sexual seduction or coercion of girls or young women by older men plays a key role: "The Stylist," "Ingrid Catches Snowflakes on Her Tongue," and "The Lonely Goatherd." So I guess what I'm saying is that the world of your fiction is not necessarily dark, but it's definitely shaded. Can we look at it as a kind of public-service announcement to be on your guard?

LM:   Again: I have very few vampires, or serial killers or sociopaths, no large scale natural disasters or terrorist attacks, no death eaters. I think the dangers in my fiction are realistic (though I'm not sure that is necessarily a good thing). I would like to think that all the shades of light and dark could flicker through any book I'm going to write. I would like to have very deep blacks, ultra-violets, fireworks, klieg lights, chandeliers and a single candle here and there. I would aim for that. Violence, in all its many forms, is fascinating. An inescapable part of being human. It is at least as illuminating about the human condition, when it appears in fiction, as love.

HW:   One of the defining features of your fiction, I would say, is how casually offbeat your narratives are. "Carmen Has Gonorrhea," for instance, centres on the narrator's fantasy of a fleet of cement trucks running amok and demolishing her husband's former girlfriend. In "Purgatory's Wild Kingdom," Olivia has a (Platonic) one-night stand with a travelling taxidermist, who insists that they carry his prized stuffed polar bear up to her apartment to protect it from being stolen. The story "Granular" ends with a couple having steamy sex and then noticing that they are being watched by a husky that they are looking after for a friend. Do these kinds of details tend to be the starting points for your narratives, or do they just come with the territory?

LM:   I haven't thought about it. I like the idea that fiction can posit out of the ordinary realities. On the other hand, who hasn't been watched by a husky on the odd occasion?

HW:   In writing Alligator, how did you feel about making the shift from the short story form to the novel? I'm not saying that this is exactly an unprecedented move for a fiction writer, but given that your style is arguably more associative and less linear and less narrative-driven than that of most novelists, did that represent a challenge for you? Did you have to go about your craft in a palpably different way?

LM:   I very much like the idea of there not being a genre at all. When I think of the work of Michael Ondaatje, for instance, I don't think "Oh, this is a short story, this is a novel, this is poetry." So I'm not that interested in whether I'm writing a short story or a novel. I'm interested in writing whatever it is. One time I was teaching creative writing and a student said to me, "We were told to write stories because you can send them to literary journals and then you will be able to publish a novel," or "We were told to write a novel because they sell," and all of that, and my response was that it's about the breadth of what you have to say. It's about how long it will take to tell it. What way are you going to tell it? That is what interests me. With Alligator, I wanted to paint a portrait of downtown St. John's, and I wanted it to be like a snapshot. I wanted it to be that you see the city all at once, like the Jackson Pollock painting, that it comes at you all at once, in all that variety, that socioeconomic diversity. And I thought the way to do that with a narrative is to have many, many voices and not to privilege any voices. In the novel, generally, there are one or two voices that are privileged, but I wanted to think about what a city would look like if every voice had equal weight, and it all comes at you at once. That is part of the way I was working when I was writing the novel. Nonetheless, I think there is this sense of tension that builds over the course of the pages, and in that sense, it's a traditional, tried-and-true narrative.

HW:   And the stories of each of the central characters are advancing as you go along.

LM:   Yes, so, in many ways, it is a plain old narrative.

Notes:

1. See Eva Tihanyi, "Plenty of Light and Shadow within which to Seduce the Reader: Interview with Lisa Moore," Books in Canada 31.7 (October 2002), 8.

2. 2 Kjeld Haraldsen, "Skittish Dance of Relationships - its Tangled Ambivalence." Review of Open, by Lisa Moore, Books in Canada 31.7 (October 2002), 7.

3. 3 Sherie Posesorski, "More Bridges, Please." Review of Degrees of Nakedness, by Lisa Moore, Books in Canada 25.4 (May 1996), 15.