Author Honor Moore on the teaching of writing

Honor Moore

A New York State Summer Writers Institute faculty member for 14 years, Honor Moore returns to Skidmore this summer to teach Intermediate and Advanced Poetry and to give a public reading on Monday, July 13. The recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Connecticut Commission for the Arts, and a Guggenheim fellowship, Moore has written poems, plays, and creative non-fiction. One of her best-known books is The Bishop’s Daughter (2008), which The Boston Globe called “Moore's memoir of her brilliant, activist father, set against significant moments in political and social American history that he influenced.”  Named an Editor’s Choice by The New York Times, the book was a finalist for the National Book Award.

In this brief interview, Moore talks about the teaching of writing.

Q: What do you think is most essential for aspiring writers to take away from your course?
I hope to give my students ways to enter their imaginations, and ways to mine what they find there, in language that is vivid, direct and their very own.
 
Q: How do you prepare to teach?  What are the challenges in teaching writing?
There are those who say writing can't be taught.  I have two answers.  One is, new writers are often blocked from their own language and material by every day concerns and the deluge of utilitarian language we all find on the Internet and television—the challenge is to find ways to break through those barriers. Also, there are tools each writer must learn—how to live like a writer, how to read like a writer.  I can begin to teach those tools.

Q: Is it harder to teach poetry than nonfiction writing?  What are some of the differences that are important for students to know, and how best to convey to writers who are learning?
It is not harder to teach poetry, it is just different.  And the distinction I would make is not between poetry and nonfiction writing, but between poetry and prose.  The differences are hard to speak of—I would convey them by reading poems and prose in class and having us talk about how we perceive the differences.
 
Q: When did you realize that writing was your career?
I began to write seriously in my early twenties and have been writing ever since. I think of writing as a vocation or calling, though.  The career is what we construct to enable ourselves to keep writing.
 
Q: How does teaching writing help you in your own writing?
I love to teach because it helps me think more clearly about how I write.
 
Q: What writing are you writing now?
For the first time in several years I am without a work in progress—I am at the beginning of writing new poems and new prose.
 
Q: What are you reading now?  Do you have a favorite author and if yes, what work by him/her do you recommend?
I have many favorite authors.  I have just read the beautiful novel Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout that just won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction.  I also recommend a wonderful book about Emily Dickinson and Thomas Higginson, the writer to whom she sent her poems.  It is the most revealing book about that very mysterious poet that I have read in years—White Heat, by Brenda Wineapple.

For more information about Honor Moore, please visit the author’s website.

July 2009

(Photo by Emma Dodge Hanson)