Right into the Fire: Notes on the Nonfiction Short: An Interview with Judith Kitchen and Dinty W. Moore

Abstract

Right into the FireNotes on the Nonfiction Short: An Interview with Judith Kitchen and Dinty W. Moore Jynelle A. Gracia (bio) JYNELLE GRACIA: How did you originally come to the essay? DINTY MOORE: The very long answer to that is that I came back to the essay. It was one of the first forms of writing that interested me as a kid. I was kind of an odd kid. I went out to used bookstores and bought every book I could by Robert Benchley. I thought I was learning about humor writing, but really I was just laughing a lot because Robert Benchley is so funny. He was an important step along the way in the essay form in some ways, at least in modern America. So that was what really interested me early on. So when I think back, I was writing essays in high school, but then I stopped, and I got into serious journalism. I wrote news stories and thought it was all about objectivity and fact. Then fast forward fifteen years when I did all kinds of other things—filmmaking and modern dance and a lot of waiting tables—and I came back to writing when I was about thirty years old. I started writing cultural criticism for the Philadelphia city paper and that slowly morphed into essays that weren't just about performance art or the theater but about what was interesting to me. JUDITH KITCHEN: What I always wanted to do was write a good short story, and that's the one thing that I've actually never been able to do. So, I mean, I even wrote a novel without being able to write a good short story. But I was basically working in poetry and then reviewing poetry. I was working in a kind of critical nonfiction, and I started to read essays—more contemporary essays—more seriously. There were a couple people that struck me as doing something that I thought I would like to be able to do. And one of them was a man named robert pope, who, to my knowledge, has not been publishing in the last few years at all. I have not seen his work anywhere. But briefly I saw one or two essays by this man, and they seemed [End Page 123] to be able to just spin out, almost the way you would in conversation, with all the digressions or whatever, and they spun and spun and they got wider and wider and then suddenly, you would just pull one little thread. DM: Yeah. JK: And the whole thing would just fall into place, and I thought "Wow, that would be fun." That would indulge probably my worst habits, but it would be a pleasure. So then I was on vacation and I was bored. And we were sixty-eight miles from the nearest bookstore. But I did have one book with me. It was Tim O'Brien's Nuclear Age. I was trying to take my time with it because I knew how long it was going to take me to get to the bookstore. There was a sentence that intrigued me in several different ways, so I just broke that sentence up into its components. I would just take the first phrase and write just as long as I could before I would feel like I would run out of material or was becoming redundant, and then I would take the next phrase and start writing, and I ended up with my first essay that way. And I had a great vacation. So it happened so easily and so naturally that I thought, "Ah, I have found the form for me." So the next essay, as you can imagine, took months. It turned out it wasn't that easy or that natural. But that first experience was quite a heady one, and it was a long, extended essay, but I could do it in parts because of breaking up that sentence. So that's what took me in that direction. I wrote the essay that was the short story that I had tried forever to write and had never succeeded in...