“Moons” by Adam Gianforcaro – Highlights!

Adam Gianforcaro is a fiction, poetry, and children’s book author.

The Writing Process

Adam Gianforcaro explained that his first moment of inspiration for “Moons” came when he was listening to the song Two Moons by Toe. The idea began to coalesce as he realized he should mesh two ideas–a couple locked in an argument and two moons hanging in the sky–together in one story. The premise of two moons was meant to stand as something amazing that gets overlooked by the characters because of their personal conflict. “I really like the idea of having this really intense experience of seeing like a separate moon that would just be completely awesome and inspiring and different, and then having something else going on internally where you can’t even really focus on something as great as finding a second moon in the sky,” Adam said. While he was writing the story he was reading a lot of Raymond Carver’s work and experimenting with a similar style, trying out “short sentences and sentence fragments.” He wanted to leave some things in “Moons” unsaid, and instead ask the reader to “connect the dots around the things that are happening outside of that current space on that porch between the two men.”

The Characters

The first version of this story focused on a husband and wife, but Adam Gianforcaro says that those characters never felt quite right. “I’m gay, but I’ve never really written a gay character,” Adam explained. “I thought this would be the perfect place to start.” He created JR and Dean, two “Log Cabin Gay Men,” out of a desire to write unconventional gay characters. When asked where he thought this relationship would go after the story, Adam explained that he thought they would continue to live in this “unwelcoming area–whether that be real or in their heads.”

The Day Job

“I’m extremely lucky. I’m actually a writer full time,” Adam Gianforcaro explained. He works for a Manage Care company, where he takes complex healthcare ideas and writes about them in a way that the average person can understand. He has to take socioeconomic, educational, and cultural factors into account when writing for work, which may affect the ways in which he creates characters for his creative stories. According to Adam, it’s very difficult to separate his professional and creative writing. “A lot of the time I don’t want to write creatively, but it’s sort of like I have to, like I have these stories in my head and I feel that it would be a disservice not to write them…not necessarily for the reader but for myself.”