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Rick Moody
Hugo House: In a few weeks you'll be debuting a brand-new piece at Hugo House-have you started working on it yet?
Rick Moody: Oh yeah. I am not the sort of writer who can write a story in ten days. I've read that Cheever did that occasionally. But I am too sloppy to be able to pull off such whirlwinds of creativity. I need time to ruminate. I need time to change "which" to "that" and back again three hundred and eleven times.
HH: Can you give us a hint of how you're approaching the theme of "Love Is the Drug?" Literally? Figuratively? Prose? Poetry? Interpretive Dance? None of the Above?
RM: I didn't understand there was an interpretive dance option. I could have rented a unitard. I suppose, in the work under discussion, that I am shooting for something that resists genre, and which is noteworthy mainly for the obsessiveness of the prose. It's really obsessive, so far. That's the druggy part. Obsessiveness.
HH: What were your first thoughts on receiving an invitation to write to an assigned theme? Any regrets on saying yes?
RM: My anxieties about saying yes had only to do with writing on an assigned topic. When a topic is assigned to me I usually begin belittling it and running in the opposite direction. This because I have a worried mind. But I was assured in this case that recoiling from love counted as writing about love.
HH: Could you tell us a little bit about your process-how you approach writing something new?
RM: This story has been a story generated in an unusual way for me, in that I tried to break it down into 1500 word segments, each segment was written apart from the other segments and without much consultation. So it's sort of an episodic story. Once I finish the last episode (the one I'm on), I'll go back and try to make them have some kind of overall coherence. Therefore: there has been much preliminary cogitation for the Hugo House piece, and that's the kind of story I like. I hate feeling rushed.
HH: Tell us 3 non-literary things we don't know about you.
RM: 1) I like to play the guitar and to sing. 2) I am in Copenhagen right now and this reminds me that despite the fact that I travel almost all the time I am not a very good traveler and would prefer to sit at home, in some remote location, and work and watch television. 3) I had a really low batting average in Little League baseball.
