I was 26 and unemployed when a friend told me about the San Diego Reader and its editor, Judith Moore. I had published a few essays and stories in small literary journals while amassing a …
August 16, 2007
Judith Moore remembered
How Truth Can Be Told
Make Something Better
I never met Judith Moore. To me she was a voice over the phone: slangy, half-cynical, eager to talk about her dog, and passionate about writing. I first talked to her in the summer of …
August 16, 2007
Faith
"Execrable." And... "You sound like a fluttering dilettante." There were many more in a similar vein. I have all her editorial comments saved somewhere on the jittery hard drive of my old computer. The two …
August 16, 2007
Mother Reader
Judith often referred to herself in the third person as "Mother Reader." An appropriate epithet, considering that after coming across my blog, she elicited a job offer from "Father Reader," thus giving birth to my …
August 16, 2007
More Was Her Thing
Point-blank, Judith is the reason I'm here. When she found out that I, at 20 years old, had a love for writing, she wanted to see for herself. A piece I'd written for another magazine …
August 16, 2007
Always Read Poetry
Judith and I shared an October 14 birthday. We met when a mutual friend threw a party for us both, 30 years ago. I was freshly graduated from a state teachers' college, where I had …
August 16, 2007
Busy fingers are happy fingers
My long conversation with Judith Moore about writing began in 1980. We first met at a monthly campus ministry shindig for the faculty of Central Washington University, in Ellensburg, Washington. Judith was escaping the small-town …
August 16, 2007
More Blood, More Pus, More Mucus
"This is horrible, this stuff about your mother. Just awful, Susie." Not since my father had someone called me Susie. And not since my father had the endearment arrived with such menace. "It's what I …
August 16, 2007
Don't Pretend You Know More Than You Do
Judith made this whole gig happen, I mean Tin Fork and the cheap-eats world she gave me. Actually, it wouldn't have happened without Carla either. She met Judith first and must have mentioned this layabout …
August 16, 2007
Tales of a San Diego manicurist
She sighs. “But I can wear jeans and a slobbed-out shirt, and if my nails are painted, I feel glamorous." She lifts her glance from my fingers to my eyes. “You know what I mean?”
December 22, 1988