On Wednesday, November 7, at 3:00 and 7:00, award-winning North Carolina poet MariJo Moore read in Bate 1026 as part of E.C.U.'s Writers Reading Series of Eastern North Carolina.  After showing some slides and lightheartedly admitting she wasn't prepared, Moore flipped through her newest book of short stories, Red Woman with Backward Eyes, serendipitously choosing the "Sweet Faces Among Sour Souls," a short story set in a women's prison in Raleigh.  In the story, an inmate -- "Singing Martha" -- is always singing in her cell while thinking of her grandchildren in order to dispel the darkness of the jail.  When "Singing Martha" dies, the narrator of the story (who loves the poetry of Emily Dickinson) takes her cue from "Singing Martha" and begins reading her poetry aloud.  Moore also read her mystical poem "Story is a Woman," which she had placed in the middle of a collage she had made -- the text of the poem, strangely enough, had printed out in the shape of a woman!

Between reading her poems and stories, Moore interacted with students, talking with them about the writing process.  Moore told students, "The only way to fail as a writer is not to write."  She also commented, "Literature teaches us about ourselves."  Before reading the poem "The Wisdom of Prose," in which various birds tell her bits of wisdom, Moore said, "Everything has a voice -- we just have to listen."  One line of this poem reads, "There are many memories coming.  Explore them."

To end with, Moore told us to close our eyes and see the images that came to mind as she read a poem in Cherokee.  Then, after asking us what we saw, she read the poem in English.  Remarkably, the images were similar, and Moore spoke of the idea of archetypes -- unconscious thoughts and patterns all people share.

MariJo Moore has received numerous awards and honors, including the North Carolina's Distinguished Woman of the Year in the Arts for 1998.  Moore was also chosen as one of the top five American Indian writers of the new century in the June/July 2000 issue of Native Peoples magazine.  Moore currently runs her own publishing company, Renegade Planets Publishing, and travels widely, lecturing, teaching creative writing workshops, and reading her works.