1. When did you write “Various Degrees of Nakedness”?
I wrote “Various Degrees of Nakedness” in 1992. I was living in downtown St. John’s with my husband, my two-year-old daughter, my sister-in-law and her son, and also my step-daughter, who was eight. It was a hot, gorgeous summer and the neighbourhood kids had the run of the house. The doors were always slamming, always a stampede of sneakers tearing down the stairs. At night the thumps from rock bands on George Street made the glasses in the cupboards vibrate.
We were pretty broke. But loaves-and-fishes kind of broke, because half the neighborhood was always over for supper. And we were always weak with laughter. It was a summer of sore stomach muscles from laughing.
I remember one night my husband and I lowered a Halloween mask on a string from a second-floor window so that it bobbed in front of the window below, where my sister-in-law, Susan Crocker, was sitting at a desk writing her Masters thesis. My husband and I were waiting for the shriek, which came moments later. A shriek followed by hysterical laughter. We were cruel and unusual roommates. My sister-in-law is nothing at all like the character Joan in “Various Degrees of Nakedness,” except that her laughter is contagious.
It was a golden summer. Or that’s the way I remember it. I was writing my face off. I was obsessed with the short story, all the things the story could do. How does meaning form? How to capture character through gesture, dialogue, action? How to make everything that happens unexpected? What is an epiphany, and how do I get me some? Every little thing seemed hyper-vivid that summer. There was certainly no question of having a future as a writer. It didn’t seem there was such a thing as the future back then. It was just a matter of trying to write one story after another.
During that time, I learned to graft bits and pieces of true-life experiences together to form fiction. I learned not to worry about what the story meant, to trust the reader to create the meaning. I learned that the best characters have mysteries at their core. It’s good if they are, deep in the very centre, unknowable. It’s good if a character can expose herself without knowing she’s doing so. The reader wants to be able to go: Ah-ha! But everything about writing a story has to be learned over and over, each time I sit down to write a story. I can say, I learned this or that, but each time I sit down to write something I am as stupid as a stone.
2. Why did you decide to send “Various Degrees of Nakedness” to PRISM?
I understood PRISM to be an excellent place to get a story published. I was sending stories out all the time back then. I liked to have at least two or three stories in the mail all the time, so that when a rejection arrived, there was still hope for the other manuscripts. I became obsessed with the mail. I listened for the rusty hinges on the metal mailbox at the same time every morning.
3. How was the editing process with Zsuzsi Gartner, the PRISM fiction editor at that time?
Yes — there were changes. The acceptance letter said PRISM would like to make a few cuts to the story “…should you accept our offer to print.” Should I? I was over the moon. I was jumping up and down. I was delighted with the changes. They made the story stronger.
4. Did any boons come from having the piece published in PRISM?
The publication itself was the boon. The whole process of sending out to literary magazines at that time meant reading those magazines, of course. And through that reading I came to know writers from all over Canada. That is perhaps the most exciting thing about literary magazines – the reader finds out about new writers, and gets to see the freshest innovation.
5. Do you have any advice for Canadian writers who are starting out their careers?
Read the literary journals and submit to them. I had tons and tons of rejections and I think it’s important to keep sending anyway. Eventually the editors begin to recognize your name. This person again, they say to each other. Eventually they become afraid for your mental health and cannot bear to reject you again. Or maybe you get a little bit better.
Interview with Zsuzsi Gartner
1. How did you come across “Various Degrees of Nakedness”? Was it a solicited piece or did it come in the slush pile?
It definitely came in the slush pile and I was very excited when I read the story. It sparkled and was sexy and highly sensory. I loved it immediately. I had no idea at the time who Lisa Moore was. In the end, the story went on to be the title piece of Lisa’s first book of short stories “Degrees of Nakedness”
2. What special qualities did the piece have that made you want to include it in PRISM?
I reread the story just now and, like all of Lisa’s writing, it’s so crisp and fast and sensual and cheeky and isn’t weighed down by back story or weighed down by anything ungainly. As any editor of a literary magazine knows, so much of what you receive is either bad, or same-old same-old, or well-crafted but dull. Also, as the fiction editor of PRISM at the time, it wasn’t solely up to me what stories we published, so I was thrilled that everyone else thought “Various Degrees of Nakedness” was as super as I did. There were other times I had to threaten to saw off my right arm to get a piece in (or to keep a piece out that I hated).
3. Do you remember anything interesting about the editing process?
We didn’t do a lot of editing during the time I was at PRISM. I do a ton of hands on editing at Vancouver Review where I’ve been the fiction editor the past three years. I will sometimes back and forth with a writer for five drafts, even amazing people like Annabel Lyon and Lee Henderson. I honestly don’t know why we did such little editing at PRISM, though I do recall a big editing process with an early Eden Robinson story, “Traplines,” because it was very, very long and she was a peach about the cutting suggestions.
4. Can you comment on your overall experience as an editor of PRISM international?
It was both thrilling and frustrating. I’m not a good team player, so it was frustrating to have to get other people on side in order to publish something. I think you can overlook gems in the rough when you publish by committee. But overall I’m proud of the issues we did while I was involved and I loved working with my pals Murray Logan (editor) and Shannon Stewart (poetry editor), though I’m much happier to be the sole arbiter of what fiction gets published as I am now at the Vancouver Review. (I guess I’m just a power-crazed gal.) I also learned that selecting, curating and editing a collection is a form of creating. It was also an eye-opener seeing just how many writers out there are hungry to be published and what a crap shoot it really is, especially when it comes to contests. Now I say huzza for the “little mags” that give emerging writers such hope. So many Can Lit stars, such as Lisa Moore and Eden Robinson, were published in PRISM before anyone had heard of them, and there are so many more. Here’s to another 50 years!
Lisa Moore’s “Various Degrees of Nakedness” appears in the PRISM international 50th Anniversary Retrospective Edition, so we thought we’d ask her about the story, which was first published during the winter of 1993 (31:2). We also chatted with author and editor Zsuzsi Gartner, who was the Fiction Editor at the time, about working on the piece with Lisa.