silk road

Dinty W. Moore
Interview by Katey Schultz

What do you get when
you cross a zookeeper
with a journalist coming
of age during the Nixon
era? Between Panic and
Desire, Dinty W. Moore's
2008 memoir and winner
of the Grub Street
National Book Prize.
Read the interview.

Pete Fromm
Interview by John Walker

Northwest American
Novelist Pete Fromm
talks about the work of
writing, the advantage
of "not waiting," and
publication. Read his
short story
"Concentrate" in Vol 3
of Silk Road.
Read the interview .

Q: When you have written your way to a new
understanding of an event or experience in
your life, does the writing hold more truth in it
than the original memory? Are there deeper
consequences of memoir writers rewriting
their own lives? How does this shape a
writer's view of the past and therefore his/her
future?

A: Yes to the first part of the question,
because I work much harder at my writing and
struggle much harder to understand past
events when I am writing about them than I do
when I am just "remembering" something for
the sake of dredging up a thought. I think,
ultimately, that the process of exploring and
writing (and rewriting) one's life is a healthy
process. I don't write "for therapy," I write for
an audience, and I write to discover a truth,
but in the end there can be a healing quality to
objectively facing the facts of one's life. It is
what the Buddhists try to do in meditation;
they just don't have the need to write it all
down later.--Dinty W. Moore

Q: Your fiction’s set mostly in the West—tall
trees, broad vistas, big rivers, small towns.
Did the Indian Creek experience influence
you toward those places?

A: Of course. But so did running rivers for six
years in the Tetons and down in Big Bend,
Texas. So did just mucking about in the west
for the last thirty years, taking months long
hitchhiking trips from Montana to Texas in
the winters, tooling about the boonies,
avoiding interstates, chain restaurants, box
stores. It’s kind of all about keeping eyes
and ears open, no matter where you are. I’ve
just happened to be in the west, mostly
outside--Pete Fromm