Looking Back: Meeting Joyce Carol Oates

In January, I met Joyce Carol Oates.
I took a cab to The Nourse theater in San Francisco where poet Robert Hass and Joyce Carol Oates had a conversation, live on the air and in front of a few hundred people. From the moment she took the stage, I was mesmerized. She is a frail, thin creature with fine curly hair. It's not that I expected her to look like a body builder. I've seen pictures of her many times and know she is slight of body even if she possesses a mighty creative mind.

Photo Cred: © 2014 Larry D. Moore

I am in awe of her.
She spoke of her book The Accursed which has to do with the haunted racist legacy of Princeton University. Fascinating. And she spoke of Woodrow Wilson's bigotry--how he was a quiet racist. She channeled MLK's pronouncement that "the ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people." That's what Wilson did--he stayed silent when racism rang out. He was the president of Princeton University, and his silence created a haunting of the halls...This is a novel I want to read.
Ms. Oates also talked a lot about her new memoir The Lost Landscapes. Listening to her speak about her childhood and her family made me want to read this book--I, too, am a memoirist, and if I can glean anything from her fantastic vision and realistic expression, I'm in.

Another new book out now from Joyce Carol Oates is The Man Without a Shadow, about a man who remembers only what happened in his life up to age 37 and after that, his memory span is 70 seconds long. This is a study in neuroscience and a love story.
Maybe more important than hearing about the plots of her books is hearing about how she tackles life as a writer. She walks for hours. She runs. And it is during those solitary times she builds worlds for her fiction. She says the best way to create a story is to start with some truth--some real, meaningful, unforgettable aspect of your life, and build the story and characters around it.

I bought her memoir and then stood in a short line waiting for her to autograph it for me. I told her I was a writer and that I loved her. She asked me what I write. I told her with confidence that an excerpt of my memoir had just been accepted for publication. She congratulated me and signed my book, "Don't ever give up."
I walked through the Tenderloin in the dark to my hotel. I should have taken a cab or an Uber. But I was too busy never giving up to care. The chilly winter air on my face, the book of all my futures under my arm, I accepted the night and its unsavory potential, the homeless lining the sidewalks, the stretches of fear before me, and I smiled. And I stole into a Dunkin' Donuts to get some coffee, "for free" the clerk said, because they were closing and throwing it out anyway.