Twice a month, The Rumpus brings your favorite writers directly to your IRL mailbox via our Letters in the Mail program.
May LITM Anne Elizabeth Moore
Anne Elizabeth Moore is the author of Unmarketable, the Eisner Award–winning Sweet Little Cunt, Gentrifier, which was an NPR Best Book of the Year, and others. She is the founding editor of The Best American Comics and the former editor of Punk Planet, The Comics Journal, and the Chicago Reader. Moore is a Fulbright Senior Scholar, has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was the 2019 Mackey Chair in Creative Writing at Beloit College, and currently teaches at the School of Visual Arts. She lives in New York with her ineffective feline personal assistants.
The Rumpus: How did you know you wanted to be a writer?
Anne Elizabeth Moore: I started writing very early and very prolifically so by the time I was 11 I had made and published my first comic. I didn’t ever decide to be a writer. It’s more like I never bothered to think about the world in any way other than as a writer. I have always felt very very lucky that I have mostly been able to make a living at it, too, because I expect otherwise I would have just let myself starve sometime in my twenties in pursuit of a particularly hilarious essay, probably about butts. It has only been quite recently that I have begun to ask myself if this is really what I want to do, and in that time have had many conversations with other writers about whether or not writing provides enough emotional satisfaction as a career choice. I mean clearly it does not provide a stable financial basis for most people, even people that you really think it should. This is something that you’re not supposed to admit, I think, not supposed to make public. How sometimes maybe even if you are a very good writer you may question your career choice. But I can tell you honestly that I have not had a single conversation with another writer in the last six months that did not engage seriously in the fact that this is very difficult work that may not always support us, may in fact sometimes damage us more than we can handle. If you can believe it, I have found these conversations incredibly heartening. I feel pretty strongly that everyone from brain surgeons to bookstore owners should check in every once in a while and see if they’re doing the right thing with their one wild and precious life. Out of these conversations, the most compelling reason to want to be a writer came from the delightful fiction writer Victor Lodato, who suggested in strong language that if I were not a writer, then perhaps he and I might prove unable to maintain our friendship. He was a little bit joking, but being a writer does place you in direct conversation with the very best people.
Rumpus: Tell us about your most recent book? How do you hope it resonates with readers?
Moore: A second edition of Body Horror: Capitalism, Fear, Misogyny, Jokes comes out from Feminist Press this spring, a fascinating project to revisit during the pandemic. When it was first published, right as Trump was coming into office (but just before #MeToo), it felt like the appropriate and correct time for this book. I was a few years into a handful of autommune disease diagnoses. The ACA was under constant threat of repeal. The President of the United States fucking hated women and reminded us all of it every day, and his Executive Order flurry had my medical team wondering aloud during appointments whether or not they could plan to manage my treatment for the foreseeable future given the potential for deportation. It was very bananas! Inside and outside of my own skin. So I started writing essays that tried to respond to these constant threats to what felt like a public body, the one under attack when we talk about public health. The essays ended up sort of interlocking into a cohesive argument that was bigger than each individual piece, and as a collection it was a really interesting thing to work on at the time. It felt grounding, to be documenting the bananasness, the banananity. I didn’t really expect readers to get it, I guess, because the logic of it was so personal even if the intent was very much political. Or maybe I was just surprised by the intensity with which they did get it. But then the publisher disappeared, so by the time the pandemic started I felt like—unprotected. Like I had already written a book that was largely about multi-level threats to public health and where was it? It wasn’t helping anybody.
Once we started working on the new edition, I was like, “I’ll just go in and sprinkle the word pandemic around a little and mention #MeToo and masks and the fall of Roe and we’ll be good.” But I had pretty much already done that! I had already written a book about the coronavirus pandemic, just without using either of those words, and about the attack on feminine body autonomy, and about the misuse of masculine power in the workplace. Which was great, because then I was able to concentrate on adding more jokes.
Rumpus: What is your best/worst/most interesting story that involves the mail/post office/mailbox?
Moore: I am very connected to my post office and physical mail, although I have largely abandoned the process of writing letters these days, mostly because of problems I am having with my right wrist. One of the reasons I moved to this village, in fact, is because the post office is walking distance from my house. The village is so small they don’t deliver mail within its confines, so I have a PO Box, and in the summer I go there every day. I mean, I came up in the zine world so for several decades I only had friends through the mail, or at least first met all of my closest friends through the mail. My postmaster is about as important to me as the mayor. Right after I moved here, the person who lives in the apartment above the post office left some kind of food in the oven, pizza bagels or something, and the post office burned down and the bookstore next to it. Nobody was hurt but we had to go to a different post office for a while and the way this other post office sorted our mail was VERY DISTRESSING to certain people and for like nine months it was all anyone could talk about, how nuances in mail-sorting strategies were DESTROYING THE SOCIAL FABRIC. And they kind of were, because they were putting a lot of pressure on local municipal fault lines and regional tensions were playing out that had first been triggered centuries back. Anyway that was years ago now and the village post office is back in working order but I think my favorite moment from the whole debacle was quite recently, when I was in a room with a lot of people and someone walked in and everyone went totally silent, like alarmingly silent, as if someone had just died. So I look at the friend I am with quizzically and she makes the shrug emoji with her face and then stage-whispers, “I BET THAT’S THE PERSON WHO BURNED DOWN THE POST OFFICE.”
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