| Molly Gloss | |
| Interview by Gavin J. Grant |
We recently talked with Molly Gloss by phone about her living in the west, writing, and her third novel, Wild Life, which is about to come out in paperback. Wild Life is not to be missed. It has already won the James Tiptree Jr. Award and the Washington Center for the Book at the Seattle Public Library's "If All Seattle Read the Same Book," 2002. It is the tale of Charlotte Bridger Drummond, a widow raising five children in the early 1900s who supports the family by writing adventure novels. When a neighbor's daughter goes missing, Charlotte joins the search, only to discover more than she ever expected to out in the forests. Charlotte is not your typical heroine -- she doesn't bend to the will of her neighbors, nor does she always put her children first. Gloss has also written a young adult novel, Outside the Gates, and two other novels: The Jump-Off Creek, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and The Dazzle of the Day. She has won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, the Oregon Book Award, and the PEN Center USA West Fiction prize. She will be touring many indie bookshops in September, see here for details.
BookSense.com: It struck me that the effect that travel or journeys had upon people was important in each of your books. I noticed in your author profile that you've worked for a freight company, and your father worked for the railroads, and I wondered if this was connected?
Molly Gloss: That's a question I haven't been asked before… I hadn't thought about it at all! I can immediately think of one answer: My dad's from Texas but I've always lived in Oregon -- on my mother's side we're fourth-generation Oregonian. We grew up poor, but my dad wanted to see his family, so pretty much every summer we drove back to Texas in cars that frequently broke down. There were five of us and two big dogs, and we camped in a 9' x 9' umbrella tent. I remember one of those trips we took in what was called a "business coupe," which had no backseat, and us kids just made a nest in the space behind the seats in the big extended open area trunk -- we thought it was grand. I'm old enough that this was in the days before the interstate highways and before the state parks.
So the roads were two-lane blacktops?
Yes, through every small town in the West. These were great odysseys really, every summer. I have horrific memories of being broken down by the side of the road when the big rigs went "whoosh!" by and shook the car. I still have trauma if my car doesn't work. For the most part they were fabulous trips. I think of them now as my covered wagon days because we would wash our laundry and hang it out the windows to dry as we drove down the road. [Laughs] Besides that, it gave me this tremendous acquaintance with all of the landscape of the West. I was reading western literature at the time so I was putting myself in these adventures on this landscape we were driving through. It fed my imagination and gave me this vast experience. I was stunned to find that most people didn't do this sort of thing. When I met my husband and he said he had never been more than 1,000 miles from home…I was stunned.
How long would the trips take?
Most of them were two weeks. In those days, my dad was getting two or three weeks vacation. If we weren't camping we stayed with relatives.
As an adult, have you just packed up and gone on trips like that?
We camped a lot but we never have taken a long car trip like that since I've been an adult. We did want to, but we just never could manage it. Either vacations didn't work out or we didn't have the money.
I don't think about travel when I'm writing my books. I hadn't thought that might be a recurring theme, but if it is, maybe that experience is behind it.
Where are your favorite places in the West?
I've traveled a deal and I've never found a place I wanted to move to. I love Western Oregon, I love Portland, and I love living here [Portland]. My favorite places are nearby. I love the Long Beach peninsula in Washington State -- which may be the setting for the next novel. That Skamokowa area that's in Wild Life -- that landscape is interesting to me. The drier landscapes of the West, I love Eastern Oregon, which is very dry, and the high desert feel of it. I couldn't ever live there, I don't think, but I like it, I like to look at it.
Can you tell me how you came to write this amazing book, Wild Life, that crossed genres, forms, brought together fiction and nonfiction? Was there a starting point for it?
I'm glad you came to that question because the larger question of how all those disparate parts came to be written is a huge question with a huge answer!
The novel began with the character of Charlotte, the woman who writes popular adventure stories at the turn of the century. I'd been collecting and reading those novels, for a while. I got into that while I was writing The Jump-Off Creek. It reached a point where it occurred to me that it would be wonderful to write a novel with the central character being a woman who wrote those kinds of novels. I knew I wanted to send her on an adventure that would somewhat resemble some of the adventures she'd been writing about. Then I picked the place for her -- I love that landscape along the Lower Columbia River in Skamokawa and began to search around for an adventure. I just started writing Chapter One, with her and her family and her children and her housekeeper and so on, without having a clue what would happen to her. I thought since she wrote scientific romances she might get involved in some kind of adventure that involved science or was scientifically-related -- like an invention of some weird sort. I was looking in chronologies and books about inventions to see what kinds of things were being invented and what kinds of things were being thought of and that they thought might be invented.
Around that same time I had a wilderness experience. My son was a boy scout, and they have a badge where they take the boys out, set them next to a tree in the woods, and leave them there overnight. The boys have no sleeping bag, no flashlight, and they just sit there in their coats with their backs against the trees and shiver and wait for morning.
What's the point of that?
It's to give them a sense of what it would be like to be lost in the woods, the enormity and the darkness and to give them a sense of what the woods are like when you're just one among the animals -- which I try to give in Wild Life. My son came home from that experience with some of those kinds of responses: This was frightening, I didn't feel at home there, I felt alien from things. I was a little bit startled and I wanted to experience it myself because I'd always considered myself an outdoorswoman and I had not been afraid in the woods. I cheated, I took my dog, but I spent the night without a flashlight and without a sleeping bag and discovered that it was a very different experience from what I'd had before. To not have that flashlight available to you if you are startled by a noise…. My dog was scared, he barked a lot, and so was I.
It got me thinking about what it is that makes us feel other than the rest of the world. Why don't we feel comfortable in wilderness? Why are we so afraid of it? Why do we want to cut all the trees down immediately because the woods are dark and scary? That kind of pushed me in the direction of Charlotte's adventure being more a wilderness adventure rather than a science adventure. I thought she might wind up with a little family group of Indians who were living in the old way, kind of like the Ishii people.
The image of Charlotte lost in the woods reminded me of Charlotte Bronte's Wuthering Heights when Catherine is running around lost on the moors. I think that's what we're led to believe a woman's experience outdoor will be, whereas in Wild Life, Charlotte's experience is very different. Were you consciously trying to show a woman who was different from other heroines?
I knew that Charlotte was a certain sort of strong-minded and strong-willed and confident person so the conscious writing I was doing was to dismantle that slowly and then to reassemble it in a different form. That was very conscious and careful.
Have you had any unexpected responses to Wild Life?
I've heard a sort of complaint, as if Charlotte should be an example for all of us and when she misbehaves some women are annoyed by that. They think she should put her children ahead of her writing, and when she seems conflicted and goes off in search of adventure and the potential story of a wild creature in the woods and leaves her children behind, they're disturbed.
Some men think she's too strident and too anti-male and they get tired of hearing her say things against men. I would just say to them, "Characters in novels don't always behave the way you want them to behave or in ways that you perceive to be admirable."
That's sort of beside the other point, which is maybe I disagree with you, and maybe I think she should put her writing ahead of her children, and maybe she's right to complain about men. But she does move into a different place on both of those questions by the end of the novel, so to complain about where she starts from seems to me to be missing the point.
Did you go looking for the chapter headings for Wild Life or do you keep notes when you come across something you like?
I spent a lot of time looking for them; in fact, I had way more of them than are in the book now. I was looking for quotes that commented in some way upon what was happening or what Charlotte thought. They had to be from things that were written prior to about 1910, mostly by Charlotte's contemporaries, people she admired or mentioned in her own diaries or journals.
There was one specifically about popular fiction and why people read it.
I wasn't looking for that, I just happened upon it in a magazine. It seemed unchanged from what's true today; it could have been written yesterday rather than in 1905. I believe it and I agree with it.
I came across something similar to that in an essay of Willa Cather's when she was writing for magazines -- before she stopped doing that and started writing more novels. Her comments were scattered among several essays, they weren't all in one place like that quote. She admitted a certain fondness for weird and popular romantic and adventure fiction.