A CONVERSATION

WITH E. B. MOORE

Q. Your previous book was based on an experience of your grandmother. Is Stones in the Road also based on a family story?

A. Yes, the story is loosely based on my grandfather’s early life when he ran away from home at age eleven, after being repeatedly beaten. He made it across the country on his own and, after ten years, returned with a notch in one ear from a stray bullet.

His story came to me through my mother, who, as a child, sat on his knee, soaking up the little he was willing to share. Unfortunately, he died long before I was born, giving me no chance to get more than the bones of what happened. I did learn enough about running away to think it a poor choice, yet I gave it a try the summer I turned five. Sure to wear boots, with a sweater around the waist of my jeans, I tied necessities in a red bandanna—my arrowhead collection and three wedges of pecan pie. Halfway down the lane, pie innards dripped through the cloth, and my mother distracted me with the promise of fresh peach ice cream.

Q. What kind of research did you have to do?

A. My research began when I traveled the route of the Overland Trail west from Nebraska. I couldn’t believe how impossible the terrain must have been for a covered wagon, and how startling to see the Devil’s Tower and the Badlands. Imagining this through the eyes of a young runaway led me to start the book. After that, I read histories of towns along the trail as well as journals of men who made the trek.

Q. Unlike your first book, this one has both a male and a female point of view. Were there any special difficulties in writing from a male point of view?

A. As a kid I was a tomboy growing up on a farm like Joshua’s, so I felt comfortable fitting into his skin, except for the sex part. For that, I had to ask a lot of questions, and believe me, there aren’t many men who are willing to have their boyhood bodies researched.

Q. Did you find writing your second novel easier than writing the first?

A. “Easy” isn’t a word I would use when it comes to writing. For me it’s a compulsion I can’t and don’t want to resist. I get snarky if I’m away from it for any length of time. But these two books did help each other, since I’d written half of Stones in the Road before I wrote An Unseemly Wife. Both were started in poetry form and then morphed into prose. I loved the writing process, attempting to become each character and letting them lead me to unexpected reactions.

Q. You’re a professional sculptor. Does that skill play any part in your writing?

A. The process is remarkably similar. In sculpture you have to look from every angle to be sure the piece works as a whole. In writing, if you don’t do the same, you end up with flat characters or a disjointed plot. Also, my love of tools made its way into many chapters. These implements now hang unused on beams in my loft, so writing them into stories gives me a chance to relive my other life.

Q. Do you need peace and quiet to write? What would be a typical writing day for you?

A. I live alone, so most of the time, my working hours remain quiet. But not on vacation. Noise made me cut those weeks short, but deprivation set in, and I learned to work in the midst of a crowded living room, participating in passing conversations or ducking Ping-Pong balls during exuberant tournaments.

On these weeks, my days start between four and five a.m. (not by design). I eat lunch while everyone else has breakfast, then welcome a second lunch at noon. Napping is a necessity, followed by edits and a much-needed walk. By late afternoon I don’t trust anything I write, so a martini and cooking with friends round out the evening. Staying awake till ten proves a challenge.

At home, interruptions demand greater attention: the call of laundry, organizing maintenance of the converted factory where I’m a trustee, culling my freezer for lost chocolates. The ubiquitous Facebook.

Q. What are you working on now?

A. I’m working on a novel set in the current day, about an elderly woman on the lam in the Boston Garden. Slipping from reality, she escapes her children’s loving clutches, running away from the hospital dressed in a johnny, a mink coat tied with a telephone cord, and a pair of goggley-eyed slippers given by her youngest grandchild.