Catherine Lacey (with Lorrie Moore and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah)

Welcome to the new season of The Writers Institute, the podcast from the New York State Writers Institute and Lit Hub. This is the first episode of five, and new episodes will come out on Wednesdays. In this season’s conversations with writers—who all listen to the institute’s archival sound of writers across decades—a new theme emerges. We’re going to hear, often, about how literary exploration leads us beyond a usual sense of who we are.

Writers are musical—you can hear it in their best readings and interviews. In this episode, Catherine Lacey, author of The Biography of X and Pew, describes Lorrie Moore’s fiction as especially influential for reasons that go beyond situations and characters; it “really has to do with the musicality of her sentences,” she says. As Rick Moody mentioned in the second episode this season, speaking more generally about writing: “I think the writing is music.” You’ll hear the music of Lorrie Moore in this episode, too. There’s sound from the Writers Institute’s archives of Moore reading from her novel A Gate at the Stairs.

Writing’s musical quality might help move writers and readers beyond themselves. Lacey mentions how “in the reading experience, you do kind of lose yourself a little bit,” and she says, “I will spend hours writing because I like the sense of dissolving my experience and making it kind of meaningless and entering the realm of this invented person.” This experience beyond self can lead to new complexities when the writer then brings work to the world in person. There’s archival sound in this episode of Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Friday Black, who describes some of that strangeness experienced when taking a new book into the world.