Lisa Moore – An Introduction
Writers Federation of New Brunswick
Annual General Meeting
Banquet: Saturday, 17 April 2004.
This introduction to Lisa Moore was presented at the banquet of the Annual General Meeting of the Writers Federation of New Brunswick at the Rodd Miramichi, Miramichi City, on Saturday, 17 April 2004.
Award Winners, Invited Guests, Fellow Members of the WFNB: Welcome to the Rodd Miramichi River, here on the Miramichi. And welcome to the AGM of the WFNB.
I would like to begin by thanking our President, Judy Bowman, for the excellent way in which she has organized this AGM. I will continue by thanking our executive director, Mary Hutchman for the quality and quantity of work she too has put into the organization of this meeting. And let us not forget all the other members of the local committees who have helped out; to all of these we offer our thanks.
Judy Bowman should be congratulated, above all, for arranging that the pack ice on the river should be moving up and down, right now with the tide. The elements are not always cooperative, but to get the pack ice moving especially for us is a wonderful thing and I am sure everyone is enjoying this slow motion tennis: eyes right, pack ice moves down the river with the ebbing tide; eyes left, pack ice moves up the river with the flowing tide. And so, in celebration of our president's achievement, I will read, downloaded from the web, a prose poem which I will henceforth dedicate to Judy Bowman:
Mist on the Miramichi
for Judy Bowman
Slowly, trees grow downwards, topmost branches solid now, mottled trunks emergent. Sun grows stronger, second by second. Mist flows out like a tide, lingers, melts, weaves itself into clotted knots, then fades away. Trees wade waist deep in filmy fabric, bending slightly in a tranquil sea of soft, moist light. Land and river slip mist’s ski masks from their faces. Now you see them, now a fine grey wool rides over each mirage and your eyes are pulled into darkness. Suddenly, ghostly gulls guide an ice floe, fast, down river. Their pinions are trimmed to uniform grey, to this seething sackcloth swishing by, sometimes silently, sometimes in a grinding of grumbling words, and sometimes in a watery chime of fragile, tinkling glass. Seagulls slice the mist with beaks as sharp as a morning razor blade ringed and tinged with blood. Long John Gull, perched on one leg, steers heroically through mist, all hope centered on some distant horizon filled with memories of a long lost sun. Now mist renews itself, is born again from some strange, fundamental funnel. It clamps its final, fatal curtain down and down until water flows invisible: an unseen presence sensed and believed in. Each concrete city bridge, a leap of faith, spanning from known to unknown.
Now it is my great pleasure and privilege to introduce LISA MOORE, our guest reader for the Annual Awards Banquet this year. LISA: welcome to New Brunswick and the Miramichi. It is an honour and a pleasure to have you here with us tonight. Lisa is, and I quote from NB Ink (March 2004, 14,1:1), the WFNB’s magazine, “a hot commodity” and “a thrilling writer.” In an interview, reproduced on the front page of last month's edition of NB Ink, Lisa Moore states that she wants to :“talk about the textures, colours, types of mark making, subject matter, and point of view shown in painting and photography, and compare these techniques to similar ones used to create fiction.”
This was done, this morning, in the workshop that Lisa ran for the WFNB. Lisa is a professional writer in the best sense of the word. She is a columnist for the Globe and Mail; she is the author of two collections of short stories; Degrees of Nakedness (published by Mercury Press and soon be re-released by Anansi) and Open (Anansi, 2002). This latter was nominated for the Winterset Award as well as for the Giller Prize; it also won the Canadian Authors’ Association Prize for short fiction. Lisa has also been praised, amongst many other things, for her “supple sensuality and emotional authenticity” because, according to one critic, she “writes like a dream” in a “truly original voice.”
Juan Ramón Jiménez, Spain’s Nobel Prize winner from 1956, once wrote the following couplet about creativity:
“No la toques más:
así es la rosa.”“Don’t revise it anymore:
roses are just like that.”For many good writers, their creative talents lie first, in knowing what to choose, and second in knowing exactly when to leave well alone. Lisa combines these two talents with another: that of creating the silence, the leap of faith, the hyper space across which, like a bridge, the reader must jump. Permit me to offer you an example from Lisa’s short story Melody (Open, p. 10). I quote:
“ ... there is Brian Fiander. I see I was wrong; he isn’t skinny. If he still wants me, he can have me. I will do whatever Brian Fiander wants and if he wants to dump me after, as he has Brenda Parsons, he can go right ahead. He seems to go through girls pretty quickly and I want to be gone through.”
[Roger Moore’s note: I pause at this point and the audience applauds the reading loudly. I wait until the applause has died down, and then I continue, first in my own voice, explaining that at this point there is a break in the text, a sort of river of white, across which we, as readers, must jump. I hold up the text and point at the white space, with my finger. “Like the river outside,” I say, “and our thoughts are bridges, leaps of faith, taking us into the unknown. But on the far side of the river, life has changed, and while we were poised in mid air, things have happened in the river below us, things about which we know nothing, things about which we haven’t even thought, for beneath our suspended time, the waters of the river have, as Heraclitus predicted, flowed and moved on.” Then I continue reading from Lisa’s text: end of note.]
“Melody and I get tickets on the CN bus into St. John’s for the abortion.”
[Roger Moore’s note: I pause for a moment to allow the meaning of the words to sink in. The audience is silent. The gaiety of a few seconds ago (was it really only a few seconds ago?) has gone. Heads have dropped. Many of the listeners are looking at the table cloth before them, some of them with frowns and more than a slight consternation. End of note.]
The story, then, is not only in the words; it can also be found in the breaks, in the silences, in the things that are not said. For the story also appears in those gaps, in these rivers, on this un-earth upon which we cannot stand, especially at this time of year, with the pack ice running. And it is here, alone, in a mental solitude, that we must learn to find our own way forward. More, for more than finding, we must create, and construct, and reconstruct our own path. Because Lisa Moore has set us the task not only of following her words, but also of making and breaking our own trails through her gaps and silences.
“No la toques más:
así es la rosa.”“Don’t revise it anymore:
roses are just like that.”Lisa has an uncanny ability to present us with the gaps and silences of life and to leave us just where we belong, poised on one bank or stranded in mid-air on a mist covered bridge over an endlessly flowing river filled with pack ice.
And now, permit me to present to you LISA MOORE. Lisa: I would like to invite you, on behalf of the Writers Federatuion of New Brunswick, to step up to the podium and read to us.
LISA!
