Catherine Lacey (with Lorrie Moore and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah)

Writers are musical—you can hear it in their best readings and interviews. In this episode, Catherine Lacey, author of The Biography of X and Pew, describes Lorrie Moore’s fiction as especially influential for reasons that go beyond situations and characters; it "really has to do with the musicality of her sentences,” she says. As Rick Moody mentioned in the second episode this season, speaking more generally about writing: “I think the writing is music.” You’ll hear the music of Lorrie Moore in this episode, too. There’s sound from the Writers Institute’s archives of Moore reading from her novel A Gate at the Stairs.

Writing's musical quality might help move writers and readers beyond themselves. Lacey mentions how “in the reading experience, you do kind of lose yourself a little bit,” and she says, “I will spend hours writing because I like the sense of dissolving my experience and making it kind of meaningless and entering the realm of this invented person.” This experience beyond self can lead to new complexities when the writer then brings work to the world in person. There’s archival sound in this episode of Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Friday Black, who describes some of that strangeness experienced when taking a new book into the world.

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