Mary Carroll Moore: On Writing and Risk-Taking
Mary Carroll Moore is a prolific writer and teaching artist with 20+ years of teaching experience at The Loft. She sat down with Alex Sirek, the Loft's Marketing Intern, for an exclusive YouTube interview. Read on for selected insights from the interview about Mary’s approach to teaching craft, taking creative risks, and the importance of authenticity in writing.
Join us at Open Book to celebrate Mary's latest novel at her Book Launch party on 10/24!
Could you give us an introduction to you and your work?
I've been teaching at The Loft for probably 20 years! Is that possible? I live in New Hampshire, now. I used to live in the cities, and I really love everything that The Loft embodies, the community, and all of the parts that help you stretch in every way. I started teaching at The Loft back in 2000. I had recovered from breast cancer, and I wanted to give some kind of gift back to the community that had supported me during that trial. I went to The Loft director at that time, and I said, could I teach a class on writing through healing–the idea that people going through some kind of illness, or grief, or some kind of trauma would be able to use writing to help them heal through it…and the class sold out. I taught at other places in the US, but The Loft always became my favorite. So this fall, I'm coming back to The Loft for another benefit. This is about writing and risk, how to align your creativity and your life. That class is also almost sold out. I think we're doing really well, and I'm excited to be back and communicate with all my friends again–all my Loft buddies.
Do you see an overlap in different modalities of creativity?
I think we all overlap, right, whatever we do kind of translates into the next thing that we try to do. I think as a painter, I really was involved with color, texture, and form. I'm an impressionist-style painter. The whole approach to painting that style is that light creates form, distance, and atmosphere. So, you study the way the light hits something, and it creates the shape basically. I kind of translated that into my writing. I found such comfort in food writing at first, because it's totally about sensory detail; how you taste, and what something feels like in your mouth, and then moving on to the smell, and, you know, texture, everything like that.
Then, when I started writing fiction, it was a little bit of a joke, in my MFA program I was assigned two advisors who were minimalists–meaning that they were not into setting, you know, it was just basically like Raymond Carver kind of writer. Wow, that was such a shock to me. Because I came from this rich tapestry of words, and I remember sending in some chapters of my novel, and my advisor took her red pen and x-ed out whole pages, and wrote enough on the margin and red pen. It was a shock to realize that I had to learn how to balance this. So, my love of the senses had to be balanced with the other side of writing which is, of course, how the story moves. The sensual part of writing for me, which was my passion, had to be in service to the story rather than taking over the story. That's kind of what I learned over those years, studying minimalism as a writer. I still love the lush writing, but I now know how to balance it better with something that moves the story forward, really.
You've written and taught extensively about the craft of writing, and even published Your Book Starts Here: Create, Craft, and Sell Your First Novel, Memoir, or Nonfiction Book. Do you have any brief advice for emerging writers trying to write their first books?
Well, I'm gonna refer to somebody called Mr. Beast, who is an incredibly popular social media guy. I did find one thing he said to be very important in this regard. He says, to succeed on social media you need to ignore the algorithm. I think the same thing holds true for writers. Say you're starting out with your first book–during the drafting process, you have to really ignore those trends and really write from your heart, find your own core of who you are as a writer. I remember this film that I loved a long time ago called Finding Forester. It was about this young man who gets mentored by this reclusive writer who hasn't been out of his apartment for years. This guy somehow gets a dare to go into his apartment. They end up becoming friends, and a young man gets mentored by this older recluse. The man who teaches him says, you draft from your heart, and you edit from your head. I remember I watched the movie a couple of times just to get that line. To me, if a manuscript doesn't have the writer's passion or the heart in it, it's gonna miss the mark. You have to ignore the trends and write from your heart, at least in that first draft to capture the essence of who you are on page.
How does community play a role in your creative process?
I couldn't live without community and writing. I think writers are in isolation so much, and community is what keeps us sane. I really think my life is pretty balanced. I think it's partly because I have this community of people to lean on when the writing takes me way too far off-center. I have a group of four (writers), all of us published, and we're working in different genres: fiction and memoir. We meet every month and talk about one person's writing and we spend about an hour, and everybody gets about 15-20 minutes to verbally give feedback. I found this group to be incredible. I also have another person that I met through the Fine Arts Work Center online classes. She lives in New Mexico, and she's also a published writer, but she's in the horror genre–a completely different kind of writer than me, but she's such a great feedback person. So when we're both working on a piece, short story or novel, we'll exchange chapters every week. It’s pretty intensive, but she's just fabulous.
It seems like you do a lot of cross-genre critique. How does working with authors outside your genre influence your perspective?
I'm thinking about the writers in my little group of four. One of them is really a dedicated memoir, writer, she's been published very widely and is really good. Her feedback tends to be more introspective, which I think memoir is so good at. And then the novelists are really into the characters and the development of the plot. So I do get really well-rounded feedback from across genres. I used to try to get into groups that only had my own kind of genre in them. But, I’ve found that if they're good writers, and they have experience, they tend to be excellent at feedback, I can use pretty much everything they say.
Your upcoming (sold out) class at the Loft, Writing and Risk: Aligning Your Creativity with Your Life, explores authenticity’s importance in writing for writers and readers. How does authenticity play a role in your work?
When I find my writing is too superficial, or I get feedback from my group that says, we really couldn't quite get into this person, this character or this section of the story, I have to look at that and ask myself, What am I trying to say here? But also, what am I trying to hide? Do I accept the risk of being vulnerable and revealing? What am I going to get criticized or looked down upon for? As writers, we stay as safe as possible for a while when we're starting out, perhaps depending on your personality. I know that I became a food writer originally because food was something safe in our house in my growing-up years, it was something that we all loved and we all talked about. I could go into that world and communicate my feelings without any sense that I'm gonna get censored. But with fiction, I have a lot of risks. In this new book, I had to really work it to see if I was willing to be that vulnerable on the page.
Aside from the risks inherent in publishing and writing a novel, I can narrow my personal risks to three that I dealt with in this book:
- One is the topic of sisters. My older sister was an addict, and she died tragically early in her life. It really, really affected our family. I had a lot of trepidation about writing about sisters. But, I wanted to take that risk and to write about something that mattered to me deeply, and to be vulnerable about the idea of what if sisters who were estranged came back together. Because with my sister, I'll never be able to rescue her. But, these two sisters did rescue themselves and each other.
- The second thing that I kind of took this huge risk about was to write a cross-genre book. It doesn't fit neatly into publishing categories. I was afraid that the reviewers, especially the trade reviews would kind of get like, Where does this book fit? It doesn't really make sense! But actually, the trade reviews are excellent. So I feel like that risk I took to write both a thriller and a family saga actually worked out really well.
- The third thing that I took a huge risk about with this book is to write about all kinds of romantic relationships. There are two same-sex partners in the book. And then there's one heterosexual couple that is really prominent in the book. I believe love is love. And it's always been that way for me, and you can't pigeonhole it into certain identities or groups. So I wanted to write about that, not exclusively one kind of relationship versus another.
Watch the whole inspiring interview on YouTube here. Keep up with Mary on her website and preorder A Woman’s Guide to Search and Rescue.