Lisa Moore’s writing has been lauded for its emotional intensity and kinetic energy.

But she is also an unconventional writer, using scene, character and metaphor in inventive ways to build stories that are both entirely immersive and engagingly unpredictable. She is a writer who finds that fine balance between what is intimately familiar and enticingly original, pushing the limits of what art can accomplish.

Her qualities as a writer, her depth of knowledge and her seemingly boundless dedication to her students have made Ms. Moore the beating heart of Memorial’s creative writing program since she joined the Department of English in 2014.

In some way, though, she has been a part of the program’s success since its earliest beginnings.

While Ms. Moore has been writing stories since she was very young, her writing career ultimately began in 1985 when she was accepted into the first creative writing class ever offered at Memorial University’s St. John’s campus.

Led by instructor and author Dr. Larry Mathews, the class would go down in Newfoundland and Labrador literary history as it kindled the original iteration of the Burning Rock Collective, a group of writers who would redefine the province’s literary fiction over the coming decades.

The class also included esteemed writers Michael Winter, Ramona Dearing and Claire Wilkshire, and Ms. Moore attributes much of the group’s early successes to Dr. Mathews.

“Larry was very good at encouraging people to open up and say what they thought,” she said. “And he was critical. Really pinpointing where a story went right or where it was falling down.”

“He was clear and precise and honest,” she continued. “And so we all trusted him.”

She often thinks of what Dr. Mathews was like as a creative writing teacher, she said, “because I’m often trying to emulate it.”

 

Larry Mathews and Lisa Moore, March 2025. Photo courtesy of Claire Wilkshire.

 

Ms. Moore has published the short story collections Degrees of Nakedness (1995), Open (2002) and Something for Everyone (2018).

She’s also published seven critically acclaimed novels: Alligator (2005), February (2009), Caught (2013), Flannery (2016) and This is How We Love (2022).

Her work has been shortlisted for the Giller Prize on three separate occasions.

February was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, arguably the most prestigious fiction prize in the world.

The novel went on to win the 2013 edition of Canada Reads.

At Memorial, Ms. Moore has taught creative writing classes on the short story, novella, and novel, and, always the innovator, she’s even ventured into teaching podcasting.

In 2018, she started recording State of the Arts, a series of video interviews highlighting the work being done within the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, a project she would like to expand to include the entire university community.

She also works to support and grow the local literary community. She’s edited two collections of stories for Breakwater Books: Racket (2015) and Us, Now (2021).

Both collections feature many of Ms. Moore’s former students – testaments to her commitment to emerging artists and to the success of Memorial’s creative writing program.

Her creative writing students have gone on to publish, win awards and achieve national recognition, which is one way of measuring a writing program's success.

Another way to measure her success is to gauge the sheer vibrancy and diversity of the literary community she is helping to build, a community telling its stories and expressing what is of the utmost importance right here and right now.

The same creative force that defines her writing can be seen flourishing in the community that surrounds her.

Like Dr. Mathews before her, Ms. Moore is trusted. Her students speak of her with a rare combination of admiration, friendship and excitement, with a combination of gratitude and love reserved for the very best of teachers.