Deborah Jean Ross: Tell us a little about yourself. How did you come to be a writer?
Nancy Jane Moore: I grew up in a world in which reading and writing were taken very seriously. My parents were both journalists, so they wrote and edited and had strong opinions about the way other people reported news and wrote stories. When my sister and I were young, my mother would take us to the bookmobile (we lived in the country, so there wasn’t a regular library nearby) to get two weeks worth of books. We’d also grab a box of Hershey’s almond bars at the store and come home to read and eat chocolate.
When I was older, my mother would edit my papers for school, which taught me more about how to write than the work I actually did in class. By the time I finished high school, I had lots of confidence in my basic ability to write.
Two things about reading fiction pushed me toward writing it. First, I came across the occasional story or novel that had a profound effect on me – for example, Doris Lessing’s The Four-Gated City – which made me want to write something that did that for someone else. For all that I read lots of non-fiction, it was always the fiction that inspired that feeling.
Secondly, I spent a lot of time as a teenager reading stories in which I found myself identifying with the main male character because any women in the stories were just there for sex appeal or to tell the man “Don’t go.” I wanted to write stories in which women got to do things. I hope I’ve done that.
NJM: Some years back, I re-read The Three Musketeers and one of the sequels Dumas wrote, Twenty Years After. After d’Artagnan progressed from a romantic young man to a disillusioned older one, I gave up, but the core story stayed with me. I love adventure stories, but of course the role of women in the Dumas stories was unsatisfying. So I came up with the idea that an all-woman Queen’s Guard should protect the Queen, and went on from there. The short story “A Mere Scutcheon” came first – it’s in my collection Conscientious Inconsistencies – and I finally got around to taking the advice of the editor who bought the collection to expand it into a novel.
DJR: What authors have most influenced your writing? What about them do you find inspiring?
NJM: There have been different ones at different times, but perhaps the most crucial ones were the ones I read starting in 1979. I had complained to a co-worker about the fiction I was reading – for years I described the mainstream/literary fiction of the 1970s as “people living in the Hamptons and getting divorced” – and he said, “You should read C.J. Cherryh.” So I found the first book of the Morgaine series at the local mall bookstore and was hooked. From there I stumbled onto most of the major women science fiction writers of the 1970s and 1980s, both those writing great adventures and those writing incredible feminist fiction. (The feminist science fiction from the 70s was so much better than the mainstream feminist fiction.) I read a few male authors, too – Samuel Delany and William Gibson in particular – but mostly I read Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree, and for awhile everything Cherryh wrote (she was so prolific she got ahead of me). Among other things, they made me realize that if I set a story in the future or in a world that doesn’t exist, I could write about women with agency without spending time explaining how they were able to be that way. That got me started.
