Short story great Lorrie Moore on Alice Munro’s Nobel: ‘This is just so cool’

TORONTO – Lorrie Moore has been described as “shy,” “reticent” and “self-deprecating” in interviews, but the American short story legend lights up like a flashlight when asked if she can recall her reaction to Alice Munro’s Nobel Prize win last fall.

“Oh yes, I can!” the 57-year-old author exclaimed during a recent stop in Toronto to chat about “Bark,” her first short story collection in 16 years.

A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (which gets to “nominate” writers to the Nobel Prize committee), Moore has long put forth Munro’s name for the honour. The night before last October’s announcement, when she saw that British oddsmakers thought Munro had a decent shot, Moore “just had a feeling” that it was the Canadian writer’s turn to win.

“I thought ‘Oh my god, this could really happen,’” said Moore, whose acclaimed collections include the 1998 bestseller “Birds of America.”

“And I went out to dinner and I said to some people: ‘I think Alice Munro is going to win the Nobel tomorrow’ and they said ‘No way, too good to be true, blah blah blah.’

“And I woke up that morning, the phone was ringing at seven o’clock in the morning, which it never does. I didn’t answer, because I knew exactly what it meant …I lay there in bed going: ‘Wow, Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize, this is just so cool, and that’s how I started my day.’”

While Munro’s win was roundly celebrated, perhaps no contingent cheered it more loudly than lovers of the short story.

And among fans of the genre, Moore is a veritable rock star, revered for her masterful use of language and the witty, dread-filled characters who populate her poignant tales.

Her novels evoke a similarly melancholy tone, among them 1994’s “Who Will Run the Frog Hospital” and 2009’s “A Gate at the Stairs,” a 9-11 themed story that Moore wrote while she was working on “Bark.”

“I would just get a little jolt of inspiration for a story that didn’t belong in the novel so I would take a little time out and write the story,” said Moore.

And how did she know when “Bark” was finally ready for publication?

“With this book, I had 10 years of stories. I said ‘I shouldn’t wait any longer. Ten years, that’s enough.’”

Readers who have quickly devoured the eight stories in “Bark” no doubt felt the same way. Critics have lauded the collection, which features middle-aged characters dealing with divorce, dating, sickness and overall life letdown. Some have called it Moore’s darkest work yet.

The author, loath to analyze her work, dismisses such characterizations.

“I think that’s silly, I think it’s just because dark rhymes with ‘Bark,’” Moore said with a laugh. “I think they see bark and they see bleak and dark. But also it may be just, you have to say something, that kind of thing. I think all my work has been dark in that way.”

“As it happens,” she says, the stories in “Bark” are sequenced chronologically in the way she wrote them, and she wanted to end “with a story that had a slightly upbeat note.”

Readers will no doubt be watching to see if Moore’s recent move from her longtime home in Wisconsin to Nashville, Tenn., (where she teaches at Vanderbilt University), will influence her writing, much of which has been set in the Midwest.

She’s said change is good for writers but for now, she admits, she’s in a total state of flux, keeping her house in Madison (where her son lives), while waiting to move into a new condo.

“I’m living in a rental near campus for graduate students and visiting faculty,” said Moore. “So I have three different cable bills, three different electric bills and I’m on tour so I’m really, really unsettled.”

She added: “But I mean so far, Nashville seems really interesting.”