The funny and poignant stories in Lorrie Moore’s first collection, Self-Help, established her as an original new voice in contemporary fiction more than twenty years ago. She has since published two more collections: Like Life and Birds of America, as well as two novels: Anagrams and Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? No minimalist, Moore uses language lovingly, fiercely, fearlessly, and allows her characters to do the same. We watch as they hopefully—sometimes desperately—wield puns and wordplay, jokes and nuance, while navigating the ambivalences of love in its many iterations.

Moore’s hallmark has become the inextricability of humor and pathos, which she explores with rare understanding. She exposes her characters in their most complicated moments of awkwardness, resignation and mysterious resilience. They face change, abandonment, sickness and loss. They face each other—from family members to lovers to strange men who invite them to sing something—anything—at gunpoint. They kiss the Blarney stone and entertain each other with Tom Swifties (“I like a good sled dog, she said huskily,”), and find themselves outlandishly costumed. They lie and confess. They are lonely and intelligent, distressed and grateful. They are enchanted with others and imperfectly loved. They figure things out too late and they crack themselves up. Above all, they’re observed with such generosity and insight that we’re returned to our own lives crushed, revived, often giggling and always deeply moved.

Moore holds the Delmore Schwartz Professorship in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where she has taught English and writing for two decades. This interview took place during the month of April 2005, over a series of emails.

—Angela Pneuman

THE BELIEVER: At nineteen, you won Seventeen magazine’s fiction contest, and at twenty-eight your first book of short stories, Self-Help, was published. How did you come to writing?

LORRIE MOORE: I came to writing out of various sensitivities, plus a love of art and literature, and a capacity for solitude. I took some creative writing classes as a high school student and in college. I just kept going, undeterred by very much, despite the many pauses and uncertainties, cultural and individual.

BLVR: What do you mean by “cultural uncertainties”?

LM: Oh, the precarious position of fiction in our world: that over the last several decades the novel has continually been declared dead, and the short story is in constant resurrection, which means half-dead or post-dead or heaven-bound. But one continues writing anyway—as has been said by many—because one must.

BLVR: Did you ever consider or participate in the other arts? Music or visual art? Drama? Your characters are often singing—Benna, for example, in Anagrams, ...