Interview with Dr Marshall Moore Our New Course Leader
This term, we have a new addition to the team, our new Course Leader in English and Creative Writing, Dr. Marshall Moore. We wanted to introduce him to our community, so we interviewed Marshall so you could get to know him a little bit. Here’s our interview with Marshall.
So you are from North Carolina in the USA, but you came to Cornwall after 15 years in Asia. That’s an unusual journey, to say the least. How did that happen?
It’s not just a journey, it’s a narrative arc. I left the States back in 2005. All my life, I had wanted to live overseas. I also undertook a career change. I used to be a sign-language interpreter, and some work-related injuries convinced me that it was time to do something less physically taxing. That’s when I decided I should be teaching at a university. At the time, Korea was the best place to get started doing that, so I was able to tick a couple of important boxes. I lived about an hour outside of Seoul for three years, then moved because I had met the guy who is now my husband. He lived in Hong Kong (and is still there, but not for much longer!), and the rest can probably be figured out easily enough. I look at this position here in Falmouth as a stroke of incredible luck. We knew we needed to leave Hong Kong, and after a decade and a half in massive Asian megacities, I was more than ready for a more chill (and less expensive!) lifestyle.
What’s the biggest difference between Hong Kong and Cornwall you’ve observed so far?
There has been a terrifying level of violence in Hong Kong for the last year or so. Living through that was a nightmare, and it only subsided because of the pandemic. Here, I can go out on the weekend without fear of getting caught up in a dangerous situation. It’s refreshing.
What kind of work do you do as a writer and as a publisher?
I started out as a short-story writer, and that remains my first love. I’ve written several novels too, and co-edited an anthology. But I do love short fiction. My own work is hard to categorize, which is probably why more people haven’t read it. It tends to fall into a grey area between literary fiction and horror, with tasting notes of satire and speculative fiction, which pretty much guarantees that publishers have no idea what to make of it. As for publishing, I started Signal 8 Press about 11 years ago after various misadventures with editors and publishers for my own books. We have mostly focused on work that pertains to Asia somehow, but now that I’m in Cornwall, my business partner (who is from India and still lives in Hong Kong, and who is also joining the exodus as soon as borders reopen) and I are having a bit of a rethink.
What’s your specialty?
In my academic work and my research, I am focused on the pedagogy of creative writing, especially how it is taught around the world. A lot of the scholarship is dominated by academics in the UK, US, and Australia, but creative writing is taught globally. How do different cultural beliefs affect that? And because publishing is a little different in other parts of the world, that affects the way creative writing is taught elsewhere as well. This is fascinating to me.
What are you reading right now?
A: I’ve finally gotten around to Lev Grossman’s The Magicians. I’m about a quarter of the way through. I was a huge fan of the TV series, and how I missed the books earlier on, I have no idea. He’s an effortlessly good writer, the kind who makes the work so much easier than it is. I’m impressed.
What’s one thing about you that we might find surprising?
I actually used to be a competitive swimmer. In my teens, I had to make a choice between focusing on academics or aiming for the Olympics. I was good enough at distance freestyle that it wasn’t unrealistic to have tried for Barcelona (‘92). But I realized after some soul-searching that it wasn’t the direction I wanted to take. Instead, I ended up at what was at the time the most prestigious high school in the US, which I then got kicked out of for various reasons and later wrote a book about. Three cheers for good life choices!
If you could choose any other place in the world to live, where would it be?
To be honest, I’m exactly where I want to be right now.
by FalWriting