Writer Gary Moore Reloads Abraham Lincoln - Page 2

Tells us about this new play you’re mounting in San Diego next week…

Burning in China tells the story of an American professor who goes to China in 1988 with a hundred parchment copies of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in his luggage and finds himself drawn into the passions of the Chinese democracy movement. Caleb Deschanel directs. He’s a five-time Oscar nominee in Cinematography, and he’s incorporating video of China and Chinese rock music into his production. The story has some features people are bound to think fictional, but it’s all true. Except maybe when the actor Jeff LeBeau steps onstage and says his name is Gary Moore and he went to China in 1988. But Jeff is so good – I’ve seen him do this role before, at the John Drew Theater in Easthampton – that when he says he’s Gary Moore, I believe him! Really. It’s amazing. I talked with him on the phone last night and I thought he was me! It was frightening but wonderful. What’s the line of Rilke? “Beauty is the beginning of terror we’re still just able to bear.” Burning in China has some of that, I hope. So much joy and hope in the Chinese people turning to tragedy, but the knowledge too that they will never give up. “We have failed,” one student demonstrator told me, “but our story will go on. We were a light in the darkness to show others the way.” When I was leaving China after the Tiananmen massacre, my Chinese friends asked me to tell their story, and so I have. May their story go on, and the light grow.

Tell us something we won’t likely know about Abraham Lincoln…

He was a sleepwalker. I use this in my novel Abe Ascending that my agent hasn’t been able to sell to anyone. It’s still available, folks, amazing stuff – Lincoln ascending in a balloon and making love a thousand feet above the White House. You can read an excerpt at my website, lincolnreloaded.com. And he loved gingerbread and never got enough of it.

What's next for Gary Moore the writer?

I'm totally blaming Abby Frucht for this. I'm the Dean at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and a year ago I was drinking scotch with the writing faculty there, and Abby reminded me that given that we don't know if we can publish what we write, there's not a good percentage in doing it for that, but if we write for the intrinsic love of the project, we can count on at least that reward. I was at a turning point at that moment because I was beginning to see that my novel Abe Ascending, though it got a very good agent, was not going to get any kind of a publisher. Foo on them, I thought — the next one's for me. So I wrote the love story of Abraham Lincoln and Ann Rutledge, all in dialogue. I didn't want another voice. Just them. I love what I created. It lives. It thrills me. But apparently much of what I feel in the story I'm projecting from the deep reserves of Lincoln knowledge and love I have inside me. Because while the readers I've shown it to all find it remarkable in some way, none of them get swept in and can't put it down. So, next for Gary Moore the writer is to figure out whether to change the novel to better draw the reader in, or to strip the novel down to trim out its exposition and backstory and make it race forward as a play and then let the director and actors draw the audience in.

Article Author: Ann Hagman Cardinal

Ann Hagman Cardinal is a freelance writer as well as the Director of Alumni Affairs for Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her first novel, Sister Chicas--co-authored with two other Latina writers—was released in 2006 by NAL/Penguin Books. …

Visit Ann Hagman Cardinal's author page — Ann Hagman Cardinal's Blog