Lisa Moore
Without support from the Canada Council for the Arts, Newfoundland author Lisa Moore says she couldn’t have been a writer. And yet, when one has savoured the texture of her prose, one knows that Moore is a writer, soaked through and through.
Her critically acclaimed short stories – Degrees of Nakedness (1995) and Open (2002) – are brimming with rich imagery. A national bestseller, Open was shortlisted for the 2002 Giller Prize and earned the Canadian Authors’ Association Prize for short fiction.
Nothing about her Newfoundland-nuanced prose is clichéd. Every story is a paper canvas on which she depicts moments and memories with an ever-shifting play of light, and with bold, contrasting colours, predominantly red and white. “Natural light is very much about time passing,” says Moore. “The suggestion of time passing is movement in literature.”
Dialogue is minimal as she paints, not with a sweeping brush, but a fine brush, an abundance of detail that only an artistic eye can perceive. Moore studied fine arts at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design before studying creative writing at Memorial University in Newfoundland, where she took up a Council-sponsored author residency in 2004.
“What I took from painting was a kind of discipline that had to do with really looking at objects,” Moore says. “If you’re going to try to interpret the physical world through paint, you have to really look hard.”
“When I was painting,” she says, “I found that I wanted the painting to have a story, a narrative.” Abstract art retained her attention for its texture. “In my writing, I’m interested in the texture of words,” Moore says. “The whole idea of abstract art is to create a visual language.”
Writing however wasn’t new to Moore. By the age of 20, she had already written radio plays for the CBC. In more recent years, she has written a bi-weekly column for The Globe & Mail and reviews for Arts Atlantic, a visual arts magazine. She also teaches creative writing workshops in St. John’s and other Canadian cities.
No longer an ‘emerging’ author, Moore has just penned her first novel, a story about a young man, a fictional character of whom she has grown very fond. The main character, her signature paper ‘sculpture,’ occupied all of her waking thoughts for more than a year. The novel, entitled Alligator, was released in the autumn of 2005.
Moore is also excited about the “creative explosion” that her home province is experiencing. Reading series, sponsored by the Canada Council, have been instrumental, she says, in showcasing Newfoundland writers, not only in Atlantic Canada, but throughout the country.
Moore writes in the third-floor study of the home in downtown St. John’s she shares with her husband, a sociology professor at Memorial, and their two children.
“Writing is reflection,” says Moore. “I experience life more deeply when I’m writing.”
by Christine Roger