In the following panel discussion excerpt,Moore discusses her views about and experiences with writing short stories.

Erin McGraw: As soon as we start talking about the short story, the long shadow of the novel shades our conversation. After all, the short story is only short in comparison with longer works, and through the twentieth century the novel has been generally considered fiction's most ambitious and important form. Nobody talks about wanting to write the great American short story (though maybe people should). Instead, we get opinions such as this, from E. L. Doctorow's introduction to Best American Short Stories 2000:

While there are exceptions—Isaac Babel or Grace Paley, for example, writers-for-life of brilliant, tightly sprung prose designedly inhospitable to the long forms—we may say that short stories are what young writers produce on their way to first novels, or what older writers produce in between...