East Harlem Comes to Provincetown

Ashley Danielle Moore, a writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center.
Photo: Agata Storer

Ashley Danielle Moore is spending her winter fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center writing about East Harlem — the Manhattan neighborhood where she grew up. “I’m working on a collection of short stories, and they’re all linked and set in East Harlem,” she says. “It’s about the neighborhood.” She describes its stoops, sidewalks, bodegas, and basketball courts through overheard conversations, neighborhood lore, and the personalities who become fixtures on a block.

The narratives intersect across the collection, with moments in one story resurfacing later with another character’s perspective. “They walk in and out of each other’s lives,” Moore says.

East Harlem, in Moore’s stories, is a place where private life spills into public view. “New York is a very loud place, with people’s daily lives publicly exposed,” she says. “I try to capture the sound and culture of the community.” Often that sound arrives through fragments of speech, “hearing the beginning or middle or end of a story,” she says. “A defining detail that reveals just as much about the person telling the story as the subject.”

Those fragments and details shape how people understand one another. Rumor, observation, and speculation all play a role. “Lore versus fact — what you actually know, what you want to believe,” Moore says. “People search for a great story, so sometimes they go with the story rather than reality.”

Moore gravitates toward characters whose outward presence masks something more complicated. “Their personalities may not reflect their interior life or emotions,” she says. Even when the characters themselves are imagined, Moore says they carry the imprint of the neighborhood.