Catherine Uroff
Oyster River Pages: What is the most challenging aspect of your artistic process?
Catherine Uroff: Each story that I write has its own process and challenge. For one story, I may work for days and weeks and months on the opening paragraph. For another story, I rework the ending fifty times before I'm satisfied. Sometimes a story will worry me for years; I'll know that it's not quite right but I won't know how to fix it. Other stories run out of me like a cut that won't stop bleeding. I wish it was more consistent but I've learned to accept the process.
ORP: What would you say is your most interesting writing and/or artistic quirk?
CU: I get up every morning at 5 AM to write. I started doing this when my son was first born, inspired by my grandmother, Dorothy Dickie, who got up at dawn to write poetry before her children woke up. I've done it for years and years, a dreamy way to start the day before work.
ORP: What books have you read more than once in your life?
CU: Too many to mention. Here are some: Wuthering Heights (a book I strongly recommend that women read at varying stages in their life—you'll be surprised at how differently you react to it when you're 16 vs 46); Cathedral by Raymond Carver; A Garden of Earthly Delights by Joyce Carol Oates; The Great Gatsby; Nora Webster by Colm Toibin; A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan.
ORP: How do children influence your art and/or writing? If you’re a parent, do your children like your art and/or writing?
CU: My son and daughter have frequently crept into my stories. They are the greatest loves of my life so it's hard to keep them away. I wrote one story called Dolphins that was about my son but lately a few of my stories have reflected some aspects of my daughter that I'm either worried about or proud of (or both). It helps me to write about her, to put down what I can't say directly to her. She's a fiction writer herself now, much better than I could ever be.
