Dinty W. Moore is author of the memoir Between Panic & Desire, The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction and many other books. He has published essays and stories in Georgia Review, Harpers, New York Times Magazine, Iowa Review, and elsewhere. He edits Brevity, a journal of flash nonfiction, and lives in Athens, Ohio, where he grows heirloom tomatoes and edible dandelions. An excerpt from his essay “The Burning Bush” can be found here. It appears in the Nov/Dec 2020 issue of the Kenyon Review.
What was your original impetus for writing “The Burning Bush”?
I have been working for a very long time on a book length memoir exploring how my Catholic upbringing and schooling, specifically the guilt and self-loathing attached to the concept of Original Sin, connects to not only my own struggles with depression but also the depressiveness (and suicides) rampant in my immediate family. The book also examines the concept of Hell, a metaphor in my mind, not an actual place with fire and pitchforks, and how that impacts the human experience. All of that, and it is primarily a funny book, which has been quite a juggling act.
How do you begin to mine memories like this one of Nora, scanning plastic fruit, that you used in the opening scene of this essay?
The dream that forms the center of the chapter, the fire in the bushes behind Nora’s house, somehow never left me. It didn’t take much effort to recover it from the vault. There are maybe five or six childhood moments that are seared into my memory bank like that one, whereas a lot of the other material is cloaked, elusive—but I have learned over the years that memory itself can be prodded until bits and pieces reveal themselves, and my maxim is “the more you remember, the more you remember.” So, thinking about the dream helped me to remember the toy cash register and the toy fruit and those little plastic cans and cereal boxes that were popular in my childhood, and that led to other memories, which led to even more. Sometimes the simple act of writing down what you do know, and then walking away for a while, allows new material to surface. It is both a mysterious and wonderfully tantalizing process.
I laughed when “God popped out from behind a bush and said, ‘Aha, gotcha!’” Can you talk a little bit about finding the voice in this essay, and how you use humor in your work?
Like so many I know, humor became a survival mechanism for me, an alternative to facing the pain and tumult in my immediate family. Soon enough it also became a way to get attention, from the cute girls whose approval I craved, from teachers, and eventually from readers. I went through a period where I tried to remove all humor from my writing—I had this idea that it was important to be “taken seriously”—but the humor and silliness crept back in, and sure enough, that was when editors started responding well to my writing. It is my voice, I suppose, so I encourage it where I can.
What project(s) are you working on now, or next?
Well that book I mentioned, the one about original sin and Catholic guilt and Hell and all of those funny things: it finally came together over the last year and is being released in 2021 from the University of Nebraska Press American Lives Series. The title is To Hell With It: Of Sin and Sex, Chicken Wings, and Dante’s Entirely Ridiculous, Needlessly Guilt-Inducing Inferno, and my goodness, it was a bear to wrestle into place. What I am working on right now are final edits and contemplating whether I should travel to the Vatican and try to hand a copy to the Pope.