San Diego Reader

My long conversation with Judith Moore about writing began in 1980. We first met at a monthly campus ministry shindig for the faculty of Central Washington University, in Ellensburg, Washington. Judith was escaping the small-town tedium she describes in her book Never Eat Your Heart Out. I would drive 40 miles up from Yakima, where I taught philosophy at a community college. I wanted to meet professors I hoped could help me climb the academic ladder, a scheme Judith viewed with amusement. In personal conversation, you always had the feeling she was searching out things you were shy about telling the world. In the beginning we mostly talked books. But each of us scribbled as well. I was working on fiction and sending travel articles to the Yakima Herald Republic. Judith began doing book reviews several times weekly for the Ellensburg paper. Her work on those reviews led to the "Reading" column she kept up in this paper for over a decade. I showed Judith a short story I wrote in those years. "Well," she told me several days later, "it has a definite beginning, middle, and end." The assessment did not encourage me, and when she asked to see the novel I was writing, I demurred. The decision was bad and good. I never did receive insightful criticism she could have given me. But her honesty might have wrenched me to stick with my day job. As it was, I got the experience of at least finishing the attempt, though the novel still sits in a drawer unrevised.

In 1983, Judith left Washington to commit herself to a full-time writing life. Though she eventually went beyond writing about her personal life, she discovered the memoir as a way to get going, spilling out painful details about her childhood and childbearing years. Soon she left us would-be Ellensburg writers in the dust. For the rest of her life, writing was Judith's way to survive and live as happily as she could.

I came to San Diego in 1985. Seven years later I ran into Judith downtown. I was driving a taxi as a part-time job, and I spirited her around town for interviews she needed to do. By then she was an editor at the Reader. She wanted me to write about a painful and embarrassing episode in my life. I couldn't do it, I told her. But our paths crossed again in 1997. "Are you ready," she asked, "to write that story?" I relented and sent her 8000 words. She wrote back, asking what about this and what about that? She must have sent 25 queries. I expanded the story by another 10,000 words. It felt cathartic, but in the middle of it all, I told her over the phone how embarrassed I felt about the things I was confessing. "It's not like you murdered somebody," she replied.

After the story appeared, Judith gave me several assignments about philosophy and religion, the subjects I still was teaching. She even got me an indulgent series of six stories on the life of part-time professors, or "freeway fliers." The stories began a transition in my life, from abstraction to specifics in their own right and from simple self-expression to learning details I never imagined about the world.

One Sunday evening Judith called me and said, "Isn't it fun?" I had to say no, it wasn't fun, because I couldn't write and I felt depressed. "Busy fingers are happy fingers," she said lightheartedly, speaking to the childishness that was escaping me. But I couldn't find an angle to get my story started, I told her. "Forget all about angles," she then said with annoyance in her voice, "and write a sentence. Then write another sentence, and another." She knew whereof she spoke. Until the last week of her life, that's the way Judith Moore lived.

-- Joe Deegan

Mother Reader

Judith often referred to herself in the third person as "Mother Reader." An appropriate epithet, considering that after coming across my blog, she elicited a job offer from "Father Reader," thus giving birth to my career. Like a good mother, she paid close attention to my growth, nurtured and disciplined my writing, scolded and cajoled my ego, and groomed me for a life in publishing.

Judith believed that a writer is never perfect -- there is always room for improvement. To emphasize this point, she was miserly with words of praise. Each week I'd send her my column, and each week I would wait in agony for her feedback to arrive in my inbox. When she was pleased with my work, she'd spend one word: "Fun," "Interesting," or "Charming." The six days following such responses were glorious, the word-of-the-week cradled lovingly and with pride at the forefront of my consciousness. But a writer is never perfect, and there is always room for improvement.

"Barbarella, whom I greatly admire," Judith wrote in response to one of my stories, "I confess that this piece bored me." She was careful not to crush a fragile ego but always blunt with her advice. Many documents were returned to me with every adverb and "just" highlighted in green, followed by "DON'T EVER USE THIS WORD." Sometimes she'd tear through a story adding "CLICHÉ" at the end of most paragraphs.

"Don't self-publish anything; it makes you look like a slut," Judith once told me over the phone. She wanted to see me succeed and urged me to "work work work" and "write read read write. If you're reading a book a week now," Judith said, "then make it two books a week. And if you're reading two, make it three."

Judith would send me books, including James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. "Mother Reader hopes that you take seriously the reading of Agee," she wrote. "I want you to read and study this book. My hope is that you will enjoy the book, but my hope is also that you will study what he has done and how. I want you to note especially his close attention to detail, the way he gives 'soul' to every door or dress or nose he describes. For people my age (ancient), this was one of those formative books that made us want to grow up and try to become writers."

Now, over a year later, I'm still trying to get past the third chapter of Agee's masterpiece. Judith once predicted, in a moment of unprecedented gushing, that I would "grow up to be a superb writer." She knew then, as I know now, that I have a long way to go. I am still striving in her death, as I strived in her life, to make Mother Reader proud.

-- Barbarella

Build Your Writing Muscles

"Writing is like a muscle, honey." Judith always called me honey, and her voice was warm like cinnamon tea. "The more you use the muscle, the stronger you get; the more you can write. Write in the mornings, honey. When you first wake up."

She called me that day because in our e-mail conversations I mentioned that I was stuck on a TV article, about 200 words short.

Her advice worked. My first column took me a week to write. A 400-word opening story followed by 10 capsules of 100 words each: 1200 to 1400 words total. I stopped and started again, edited and revised, and seven days later I was finished.

Now I can write one in four hours.

I write in the mornings. With a mind still frizzy from sleep and slowly popping alive with the help of coffee, I sit and write. Every morning. A short story about a dog and a bird on the sidewalk. An observation of a pregnant teen girl struggling to get aboard a bus. All crap. All of it. Stuff you'd conscript to the bottom drawer if not the bottom of a ravine.

But I talked with the page, and the conversations came easier.

I talked with Judith on the phone, and our conversations came harder. I didn't know she was dying of cancer and the treatments were causing her great grief. She never told me she was sick.

"Would you please let me finish what I was saying," Judith snapped during our last talk.

"Yes. Of course. I apologize, Judith. Go ahead. Wait. Judith?" I interrupted again.

"Yes, honey," cinnamon tea.

"Are you okay?"

"Yes, honey. You know...I'm going to be just fine."

-- Ollie

Let the Tape Recorder Do

the Work

I could almost be tempted to resent Judith for getting my hopes up. When she signed my copy of her food memoir Never Eat Your Heart Out back in 1997, she inscribed it, "To Matt (our big new talent)...With admiration, Judith."

I was 24, two years at the Reader. She was a two-time National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship winner (and later she would garner a Guggenheim). She had been published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the house that published Walker Percy and Flannery O'Connor, two of my literary idols. She had been reviewed, favorably, in the New York Times. "Big new talent"? "With admiration"? I would have been giddy, except I was incredulous.

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