Author Lorrie Moore returns to accept CU alumni artist award

By Franklin Crawford

Lorrie Moore arrived in Ithaca last month along with the season's first snow, a coincidence for which she should not be held accountable. The highly acclaimed author was on campus to receive Cornell's 2004-05 Distinguished Alumni Artist Award, an annual honor established in 1997 by the Cornell Council for the Arts and the Committee on the Arts of Cornell University Council. It was Moore's first visit to Cornell since 1990, when she served as a visiting professor.

On Nov. 8 she read to a full house in Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium and the following morning she slid downhill from her guest suite at the A.D. White House to breakfast with students in the English Department Lounge in Goldwin Smith Hall.

Moore fielded questions from both undergraduates and graduates, three of whom were Moore's former students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison: Cornell Creative Writing Program MFAs Jon Hickey and George McCormick, and Jessica Hutcheson, a Cornell lecturer in English. Moore received her Cornell MFA in 1982, and the bulk of her thesis lay in the pages of Self Help, a collection of short stories that marked her entry onto the American literary scene in 1985. As recently as October she received the Rea Award for short story writing, a $30,000 prize. Her publications include: Birds of America (1998), Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (1994), Like Life, (1990), Anagrams (1986) and Self-Help.

On Nov. 9, Moore and Carson Chan '04 were feted in the Herbert F. Johnson Museum's scenic overlook -- also known as the museum's sixth-floor conference room. Chan, now a master's candidate in architecture at the Harvard University School of Design, received the CCA's 2004 Undergraduate Student Artist Award.

Following a delightfully quirky introduction from English Professor Emerita Alison Lurie, Moore stepped forward to accept her award -- a glass sculpture of McGraw Tower fashioned by Eric Hilton, an area artist of international renown. Moore's acknowledgments included fond memories of Ithaca and her Cornell writing workshop professors.

The following excerpts were taken from those comments. With the exception of Dan McCall, all mentioned were in attendance:

On Lurie: "In private she might give wise and practical advice, like, 'Don't listen to what Becky said in class,' or 'If you want to write, don't go into publishing. It will wear you out and make you dislike writers a little.'"

On McCall, professor of English: "He was greatly admired in an old-fashioned way, his literary taste was deemed demanding and true and tales of his witty displeasure and stern, pedagogical deadpan assisted us in our work."

On Lamar Herrin, professor of English: "He liked sentences of mine no one else liked, and he would encourage stylistic and tonal reach, and recommended novels by prose stylists he was enthusiastic about -- not all of them Southerners at all."

On Jim McConkey, professor of English emeritus: "Gentle and generous, he brought to his discussion of writing not only an appreciation of the private mystery of each individual piece of fiction ... but simultaneously, almost contradictively, a great sense of his own sharing in our endeavor, that we were all working with great difficulty and loneliness at the same thing."