“I wasn’t cool in high school. I was like you guys,” author Rick Moody said, as he welcomed the crowd of creative writing students in the library on Wednesday, November 14.
Moody then read a collection of stories and poems, pausing occasionally for the audience to respond to his offbeat sense of humor.
Although the reading wasn’t advertised to the general Stuy community, the event received a large audience because of the three creative writing classes—English teachers Jonathan Weil and Annie Thoms’s creative nonfiction classes and English teacher Emily Moore’s poetry class—in attendance.
Thoms, who met Moody through a Stuyvesant alumnus John Kwok (’78), invited Moody to Stuyvesant. The author is known for his second novel, “The Ice Storm” (1994), which was later made into a film.
He has since published two more novels, three nonfiction works and a plethora of short stories and essays. Recently, he worked on a series of 20-minute “free writes” in which he produced several memoir-like short stories.
“I never made any decisions about content or the direction of the story,” Moody said. “I just turned the computer on and I just went at it for 20 minutes […] As a result, the stories became about language and about sound.”
Moody read one of his free-writes—“Physically Adaptive End User Interface Hyper Industrial Indoor Appliance,” two stories, “Metal” and “I Hate Cheese”—as well as three “found poems” assembled from fortune cookie messages.
“He uses good concepts, like in the poems that he made out of fortune cookies. I liked the novelty,” junior Julia Cabot said.
Moody’s writing style is informal and rambling, often spiraling into repetitive lists and stream-of-consciousness observations. He contrasts this with pithy epiphanies, which are all the more dramatic due to their suddenness.
Senior Vivian Truong said, “He alternates between very humorous and very dramatic.”
Moody’s works have a playful, slightly nonsensical humor, which works well when set against the themes he uses in his writing: the awkwardness in growing up, suburban family life and popular culture. As a result, many of his works have a memoir-like quality. Moody said “about 49 percent” of his writing is based on fact.
“[Moody] plays around with the line between truth and fiction,” Thoms said.
Some took note of the discrepancy between reading Moody’s work and hearing it read aloud. Junior Tiphannie Yin said, “When you read something you make your own interpretation, [Hearing how the author wants you to interpret it] can change the entire mood of the writing.”
Despite the free-spirited, merrily disorganized quality of his writing, Moody revealed himself to be a planner. “I’m not a spontaneous person,” he said.
“I found social interaction difficult when I was younger. I would always think of things to say after the moment had passed. I started making stories so I could say the things that I never had the chance to say,” Moody said.
Moody ended the reading by discussing the merits of revision. “Revision is the soul of the craft,” he said. “I liked the white-hot experience of drafts but when I looked back, what I wrote in comparison was horrible.”
Said Moody, “The problem with high school writers is that they don’t attend to the senses long enough. Revision will help you with that. It’s really satisfying. The best part of writing is making the sentence sing.”