Elizabeth Gutting & Kris O’Shee Discuss "Our Last Blue Moon"

by Elizabeth Gutting, Assistant Director of the Cheuse Center

Elizabeth Gutting & Kris O’Shee Discuss "Our Last Blue Moon"

I first met Alan Cheuse in the fall of 2009. I was a first-year MFA fiction student in the creative writing program at George Mason University, and I was enrolled in Alan’s World Story class. Like so many others, I knew Alan from his voice on the radio. For years, he was NPR’s “Voice of Books.” He came into the classroom wearing jeans and a denim jacket — his uniform, we’d soon learn. But his demeanor was serious, verging on solemn. I felt both intimidated and slightly disappointed. I wondered how I’d ever get to know Alan, who seemed aloof and a bit cold as he described the reading list, which included 18 titles, many of them entire collections of writers like Gogol and Bowles and Bellow.   

But then an opportunity arose. Alan needed a research assistant for the book he was working on. The position came with a small stipend, and I leapt at the chance to help a writer with research. Alan responded promptly to my email, asking to meet during office hours. Soon he was sending me emails with subject lines like, "Question to research" and then: "Is there a concept of hell in animist religion, particularly African animism?" or "What books might a young girl have been reading for study and/or pleasure between, say, 1830-1840?"

When Alan learned that I lived in DC — not far from where he and his wife Kris O’Shee lived — and that I took the metro and shuttle to Mason, he offered to drive me home after class each Tuesday evening. At first, we spent the car rides mostly in silence. Before he left the parking garage, Alan would call Kris on his flip phone. He’d tell her he was on his way, and that he loved her. I remember the first time I heard this tenderness in his voice, and how it surprised me, coming from the gruff professor I knew him to be. In time, Alan and I began to talk more and more.

Front cover of Kris O

And soon, I met Kris, who I’d begun to hear much about: she’d been a dancer and choreographer, and was, by that time, a psychotherapist. Alan had finished the book I was helping him research (Song of Slaves in the Desert), and he asked if I could help Kris with some of her work. I agreed, and came to their house in Cleveland Park for the first time in February 2010. Kris and I laughed together so much right from the start, and I loved being in her and Alan’s home. After my first year in the MFA program, they asked me to housesit for them while they were in California for the summer.

Alan and Kris were both enormously supportive of me when I was a graduate student. Alan went on to become my thesis advisor, and worked with me closely on the novel I turned in at the end of my third year. Throughout the MFA program, I took as many classes of Alan’s as I could. He inspired me to read more widely than I’d ever read, and to write with more rigor and routine than I’d ever been able to manage on my own.

When Alan died suddenly in 2015, I was among dozens and dozens of devastated students. I went to see Kris, and started visiting her regularly. We grew even closer than we’d been when Alan was alive. In January 2018, she told me she was writing about when she and Alan met at the Djerassi Residency in Woodside, California. She sent me a draft of an early section of what is now her debut memoir, Our Last Blue Moon. "Yikes!" she wrote. "Here it is. I hope Alan is watching."

Our Last Blue Moon is a love story, a tribute, and a memoir of two artists: Alan Cheuse the writer, and Kris O’Shee the dancer and choreographer. The book will be released on October 5, and its publication also marks the debut of Watershed Lit Books, the new imprint of Stillhouse Press that publishes projects that develop from the collaborative work of the new Watershed Lit center at Mason. Kris will read from the book and speak with Nicholas Delbanco for an online event with Politics & Prose on October 2nd (registration and details here). This event will celebrate the Cheuse Center’s fifth year anniversary, and all proceeds from book sales will go to the Cheuse Center. Our Last Blue Moon can be preordered online now.

Ahead of her reading, I had the chance to talk with Kris about how much this book moved me — and how it brought Alan roaring back to life. Below is a transcript of our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity.

Elizabeth:

Near the end of Our Last Blue Moon, you write: “A year after Alan died, he would have found me sitting at his desk, writing and writing. In writing, I have been able to stay close to Alan. In grieving, I've deepened our bond.” This is such a profound and moving idea: that even without Alan present in your daily life, he has lived on as you’ve sat writing in his chair every day. How did you begin this project? When did you know this was a book?

Kris:

I didn’t start writing until a year or so after Alan died. I started with a grief journal and then I began writing with more intention. This may sound a little morbid, but the year after he died, I was reading his love letters to me from the first summer we met. And one day I decided I was going to answer them. I answered them like I had just received them. That’s when I realized I wanted to write our love story. I began with the Djerassi section — the first two weeks of our lives together — and that was so much fun to write. And then I was compelled to write about the last two weeks of our life together, and so I wrote the scenes from the hospital in California, after Alan had the accident. Once I had those two sections complete, I filled in the rest of our story by writing about our life here in DC, and then I began writing about my dance life. But from the beginning, I had that structure in my mind: the first two weeks at the Djerassi residency — the instant when we met and fell in love — and the last two weeks, when I lost him in an instant.

Portrait of Alan Cheuse

Elizabeth:

You spent most of your professional life as a dancer — dancing and choreographing until you were 57 — and then you became a psychotherapist. You mention in the book that you’ve got a silly side, which I know to be true. Alan, on the other hand, could be very serious. But you were both artists, and respected each other’s artistic endeavors above all else. Now that you’ve written this book, do you see an intersection between your life as a dancer and your life as a writer?

Kris:

Well, first, I was just as serious as Alan — it’s just that dancers are silly! We have to be, because it’s so painful to train, and to be in the studio all day, jumping up and down and half the time you have ice on some body part. So you’ve got to have a sense of humor about it or you won’t get through it.

But one of the things I loved about writing this book was that it was solitary. I could close the computer down and nobody had seen what I’d just done. I’d walk out of the house after writing and think, whew, nobody has to know about any of that. Whereas in dance, you're always exposed. Every single movement you make is being watched. So it was a huge change for me to put my butt in the chair and write. And in the end, I do think writing is much harder than dancing.

Elizabeth:

Throughout the book, you describe Alan’s three professional arenas: writer, reviewer, and teacher. Alan remains one of the most important teachers I’ve ever had, and he still has a significant impact on my writing. As a student of his, I learned so much that I still take with me today — I can hear his authoritative editorial voice in my head sometimes as I type! I know that many other students of Alan’s feel this way, too. Can you talk a bit about Alan the teacher?

Kris:

Alan and I had a little competition: I wanted everybody to dance, and he wanted everybody to read and write! I think Alan came out of the womb reading. He would get in trouble in school for taking books off the library shelves that the teacher said he shouldn't be reading yet.

You know, though, that when I met Alan, he was 50 years old. He’d only been writing for 11 years; he published his first story at age 39. And all the years before that, it was his love of literature that had brought him into the classroom. He was a natural teacher, as you know, but in the early years — when he was starting out as a writer and also teaching — he would sometimes express to me that he wanted more of his time for his writing. For a time, he felt teaching was a distraction from his writing. Of course once he was in the classroom, he loved it.

But then what I saw happen was this incredible passion for teaching in the last ten years of his life. I remember once, I think it was the summer of 2014, we were home in August after our summer in California, and I said, “Oh, you must not feel like having classes begin again.” And he said, “You know, I have to tell you, I really missed teaching over the summer. I can’t wait to start up again.” I think that may have been the year that he started singing Dylan songs in class, like “Blind Willie McTell,” and he would come home and tell me how much fun he’d had. When Alan really let his voice go, he had a huge voice.

Elizabeth:

Yes — I remember him singing in one of my classes with him. He had a beautiful voice.

Kris:

It took Alan a long time to let that part of his personality reveal itself — because he was always holding in. He used to say that he had to save his energy for writing. And that’s why he could seem kind of reserved, because he gave it all to his writing. He wouldn’t express everything in class or even socially, because he had to have it the next day for his writing. Of course I was the opposite. I couldn't express enough.

Elizabeth:

On the subject of Alan and reading, can you talk about the importance of international literature in Alan’s life?

Kris:

From early years, Alan was very curious about works of literature from countries outside of his own. When he was in graduate school getting his PhD in comparative literature, he wrote his dissertation on a South American novelist. He also lived in Mexico for a couple of years, and taught high school there. Often, when he reviewed books on NPR, he would review writers from other parts of the world that no one had heard of before — and he would bring these writers into the mainstream with his reviews of their books. He believed that if we could understand people in other cultures, there would be greater harmony and peace in the world. And he believed that the key to gaining that understanding was by reading books written by writers in other countries.

Photo of Alan Cheuse and Kris O

Elizabeth:

As you were writing the book, did you feel Alan’s presence with you — his love of reading, his love of writing?

Kris:

Alan was my only writing teacher, though he didn't know he was teaching me. I learned to write, I think, by reading his work — and being his first reader and editor — and also through reading other books, and then he and I would talk about those books. I do think that as I was writing Our Last Blue Moon there was this natural infusion of his aesthetic, his way of writing. I hope that in the book I have my own voice — but I also do think that some of my writing reflects the things about Alan’s writing that I loved most. I think it’s got to be true that all writers take their favorite writer and try to write as beautifully as they do.

Elizabeth:

Is Alan your favorite writer?

Kris:

Oh, I am so biased. I am unabashedly biased about that. Yes, Alan is my favorite writer. I think his writing is incredibly beautiful. The language is so beautiful. The lyricism and prose — you know, in the beginning, that's what made me fall in love with him. I read his prose and I thought: oh my God, this is in him.

Elizabeth:

In the book, you talk about reading The Fires again as a way to comfort yourself in your grieving.

Kris:

The widows of writers are really lucky that they have the books their husbands wrote. Because after their death, you can go into the heart of your spouse through reading their work. And yes, The Fires felt particularly prophetic, which I talk about in the book. And I've also re-read a lot of Alan’s books in the past few years, and a lot of his short stories and essays, which are wonderful. Being able to reread these things or read some of the things for the first time, it reaffirms everything. I always felt about Alan that he was not just a wonderful artist, but he was an amazing person. He had such good character and integrity, and I respected him as a person so much. And it’s all there, in his books.