Rick Moody is the author of Demonology, Purple America, The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven, The Ice Storm and Garden State, which won the Pushcart Press Editors' Book Award. He is a past recipient of the Addison Metcalf Award and a Guggenheim fellowship. Moody has contributed fiction and essays to most major publications and has been widely anthologized. His most recent book is The Black Veil. He lives in New York.

Katherine Darnell: The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven closes with “Primary Sources,” an annotated catalogue of books and albums. In the first footnote it reads: “this list of some of the books I have around the house now – is really an autobiography.” Clearly, you feel like your reading and listening materials shaped you in significant ways. I would argue that a lot of artists feel similarly strong attachments to the works that influenced them. Do you still feel like you’re being actively shaped by words and music with the same power as in your formative years?

Rick Moody: Definitely. I think, actually, that writers often efface or conceal their influences. Part of the idea of “Primary Sources” was just to be right out there with the influences, to depict myself as primarily intertextual. Actually, the same idea undergirds The Black Veil. I sort of thought of that book, at one point, as the full-length analogue to “Primary Sources,” because it’s about how Hawthorne writes through me, in the same way that all those other books I listed in the story write through me. In all this, I’m trying to de-romanticize the myth of the individual talent. I very much seem myself as one voice in a generation of writers doing some particular things, not as a sui generic art warrior.

KD: Writing and religion are often described of as ways of ordering and making sense of the world. Religion usually occupies a place in the fictional worlds of your writing. An almost biblical tone dominates Purple America, and theology (or the specific lack thereof) figures in much of your other work. What specifically draws you to religion?

RM: I would probably make a distinction, in answering, between spiritual life and religious life, at least for me personally. While I occasionally have my problems with institutional religion, I have found through most of my life that spirituality is something for which I have a fair amount of longing. What spirituality means exactly I will leave up to the reader to decide. It’s probably what can’t be spoken of in words. It’s probably what is beyond or apart from the empirically verifiable. I wouldn’t say I am “drawn to it,” so much as it exists for me and makes a case for itself. Maybe spirituality chooses me as much I choose it. And not because I’m such an adept or particularly smart about these things. Actually probably because I am somewhat vulnerable and unsturdy in many areas.

KD: What about religious thought continues to pique your interest?

RM: Religious thought is an attempt to discuss the above, and when it has been attempted by people of great insight, Teresa of Avila, let’s say, or Augustine, the Dalai Lama, Thomas Merton, it just seems to get at something for me. It makes my burdens a little bit lighter. I really like reading this stuff, even if I have the traditional short attention span of my generation. Sometimes I can only read a paragraph at a time of theology. But I keep plugging away, despite ignorance.

KD: Do you think that religious faith is a central concern to most writers, even those who might deny it?

RM: It’s certainly a very, very interesting part of human psychology, and since most fiction writers (probably most poets, too) are informed amateur psychologists, you’d think religion would be a natural area of intrigue. However, the question of religion in contemporary life is complicated and it tends to polarize a crowd whenever it comes up. I try to stay open to the liberal wing of Protestantism. It still seems to have a lot of validity to me. But I don’t talk to other writers about it. One must believe in something, and ritual is among the things I believe in. Others should do as they wish.

KD: Music is also vital to your work, both in terms of establishing tone and pacing, as well as playing a narrative role. You’ve said that music is one of your great loves. Can I ask what musicians or bands you are listening to now?

RM: The listing impulse seems to disappoint me these days, generally speaking. Whenever I list, I’m conscious of the list as a failure, so this is a question that I’m bound to feel badly about later on. Accordingly, the best thing to do is to recognize the provisionality of lists and just tell you what’s piled on the table across from where I’m sitting right now: the posthumous Elliott Smith album; Lamonte Young’s recording of just tamboura music and also Pandit Pran Nath’s Night Ragas; some limited edition Brian Eno stuff; Seven Swans by Sufjan Stevens; Sun Kil Moon; Arc by Neil Young; the recent Chris Stamey and Yo La Tengo record; a bootleg of the band called The Books; a miscellaneous anthology of electronic music from the early seventies; a bunch of stuff by an Australian band I really love called The Necks; ambient recordings of the Everglades National Park; a CD of animal sound effects; Animal Collective; Red House Painters; an anthology of hip hop my wife made me for my 43rd birthday (I’m really uninformed and somewhat resistant to hip hop, so I’m trying to learn).

KD: “The Mansion on the Hill” is one of your most powerful short stories. You’ve also said that it’s the story that you least like to discuss. How do you feel when you’re asked to comment on the specific inspiration for your work, or the genesis of an idea, or asked about the relevance of a fictional work to your “real life”?

RM: I don’t like talking about the autobiographical specifics of stories, just because the talk robs the work of some of its mystery. I guess I sort of don’t like talking about myself that much. When I was touring for The Black Veil I was in a state of nearly constant anxiety, because of having to talk about myself. The raw material, the death of a sibling, in “Mansion” has a basis in my life, as just about everyone who has read Demonology probably knows by now. But it was written almost two years after I lost my sister, and it begins to reflect the way imagination begins to do its dance with memory. So it’s about what it appears to be about and, at the same time, not about that at all.

KD: I’m always curious about writers who make the jump from fiction to non-fiction. It seems like it might be difficult to suddenly operate under a completely different set of rules, where adherence to fact/truth is primary and the writer is not supposed to construct events in ways that suit the narrative to appeal to your whims. With The Black Veil you took creative liberties with the convention of the memoir, but it still required a strong adherence to fact. What was the experience like of writing a memoir after establishing yourself so solidly as a writer of fiction?

RM: I sort of think of The Black Veil as a novel now. I never had total allegiance to the term “memoir” as a way of describing the book. In Europe it is considered a novel, in the same way that W. G. Sebald was considered a novelist. Certainly the book is structured in ways that are much more consonant with contemporary experimental writing than with the memoir. And this is partly because the memoir as a form is hackneyed and predictable these days. It is true however that I was hemmed in by the truth, and boy was I happy to be done with that.

KD: Later in their careers, so many writers end up denouncing their first novel as amateur. It strikes me as a sad irony that often an author’s first novel is the most earnestly toiled over and sometimes even the most heartfelt. Although it was well reviewed, have you ever felt any remorse about Garden State?

RM: I feel some remorse about how poor it is, for sure. I feel this way about most of my work, however. I can tolerate the infant because he is kind of cute, but once he starts to grow toward adolescence, I am contemptuous of him.

KD: There is a lot of debate about the value of pursuing a Masters of Fine Arts in writing. What effect did earning your MFA from Columbia have on your work?

RM: I’m not a big booster of the MFA degree. I think it helps and harms in equal measure. I am finishing an essay on the subject which may win me a little bit of hostility, I’m afraid. But I was a writer often abused in graduate school, and I found the whole experience pretty useless, except for the time it gave me to work outside of the rat race. I don’t recommend it, except for writers in their mid to late thirties (or older) who have been working alone for many years and who need to operate within a community a little bit.

KD: Do you feel that you would have achieved the same accomplishments and gained the critical acclaim that your work enjoys had you not pursued an MFA?

RM: Yes.

KD: What has been the most professionally rewarding event in your career?

RM: There have been a lot of nice moments. I was gratified by the PEN award that The Black Veil received, after all the controversy surrounding that book. I was excited to be at the opening of the New York Film Festival when The Ice Storm was screened there. I really enjoyed a live reading of my radio play (with George Plimpton as narrator) that The Paris Review staged in 2002. I was obviously really happy, after 22 rejections, when Pushcart Press accepted my first novel, Garden State.

KD: The life of a writer is often a struggle – to stay motivated, to stay inspired. What drives you to continue writing – do you always feel like there’s a well of fresh ideas inside of you that you want to tell - or is it a struggle to stay inspired?

RM: I have days when I think it would be easy to give up. But eventually the impulse to work seems to return. I like the habit of it. I like being open to language and to the long slow accretion of meaning in books. I like that the history of literature uses me for something.