In this interview, we chat with Rod Moody-Corbett about tonal dissonance, sponging up influences, writing from memory, and so much more.

Rod Moody-Corbett is an award-winning writer from Newfoundland. His writing has appeared in Socrates on the Beach, The Drift, The Paris Review Daily, and Fiddlehead, among other publications. He is the recipient of the 2022 Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Story, a Newfoundland and Labrador Arts and Letters Award for Short Fiction, the University of Calgary’s Kaleidoscope Prize, and the CBC Canada Writes Short Story Prize (People’s Choice Award). He serves as a contributing editor for Canadian Notes and Queries.

Books mentioned in this episode:

• Experience – Martin Amis
• Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World; The Hundred Brothers; The Verificationist – Donald Antrim
• Last Evenings on Earth – Roberto Bolaño
• Save the Cat! Writes a Novel – Jessica Brody
• My Education – Susan Choi
• Underworld – Don DeLillo
• Notes from Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky
• The Last Samurai – Helen DeWitt
• Erasure – Percival Everett
• Bad Behavior; Because They Wanted To; Don’t Cry – Mary Gaitskill
• A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me; Jernigan – David Gates
• Airships – Barry Hannah
• The Road Through the Wall – Shirley Jackson
• Get Shorty; Rum Punch – Elmore Leonard
• Last Resort – Andrew Lipstein
• The Sentence is a Lonely Place – Garielle Lutz
• Moby Dick – Herman Melville
• The Ice Storm – Rick Moody
• Lectures on Literature – Vladimir Nabokov
• A House for Mr. Biswas – V. S. Naipaul
• Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas; Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family – Nicholas Pileggi
• Monkey Beach – Eden Robinson
• The Life of the Mind – Christine Smallwood
• The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman – Laurence Sterne
• The Visiting Privilege – Joy Williams
• To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
• Sour Heart – Jenny Zhang