The Book Sense 76
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BookSense.com: I've read that Willa Cather is your favorite author. Why?

I love her prose. I think she knows how to craft a beautiful sentence. Her books are always about landscape and the human response to that landscape -- which are two of the big things I appreciate in a novel -- and things actually happen in her books, it's not just whining and whimpering. It's always beautiful prose and there are layers to be gotten at. Her books reward re-reading.

Was she very popular at the time she was writing?

By the time she died I think she was. She was one of the few women that were accepted as part of the literary canon -- at least on the margins -- of all those white males. She was always able to make a space for herself.

Was she aware of being one of the few women in her position?

I think she was. I haven't read a full biography of her. I know she lived in the East in that very feverish Eastern intellectual literary community that was thriving then and felt very much a part of, and was accepted as part of, that group. She didn't really find her sea legs as a writer, as it were, until she went back to her landscape, Nebraska and then the southwest, to mine those fields for her fiction.

Are any of the books you read from that period in print?

The ones in print are by people who have established a certain kind of reputation, whose work maybe went out of print that has come back in. For example, Mary Austin, who was out of print for a long time, but now has made it back onto some syllabi and is at least marginally in the canon. The real straight-out adventure for the most part is not in print. There are some small publishers who have brought out retro series. I saw Mary Hallock Foote's A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West in a new-ish edition, which was part of a California fiction or Women's Adventure Fiction series.

The interesting and hopeful thing about that is those books are becoming more and more collectible and expensive. When I started collecting I could actually afford them and now it's getting so I almost can't because people are starting to pay attention to them. There's been some scholarly research about the ways in which those women writers tried to subvert the standards of the day, which has generated some interest in the books. People want to look at them to see how they treated their heroines differently from the way men treated the women characters.

Did you notice that in your reading?

Absolutely. Which is one of the reasons I started collecting them. I was looking for a book for Liddy Sanderson to receive in the mail in The Jump-Off Creek. I wanted her to be a reader and I wanted her to get a book in the mail from her women relatives. I knew instinctively that Liddy would be attracted to a book in which there was a strong woman heroine. The book I wound up sending to her was Marah Ellis Ryan's Told in the Hills (1890), a wonderful book with a lot of the same moral complexities and interesting dynamics as The Virginian. The Virginian has never been out of print, but Mara Ellis Ryan's book has been out of print for about 100 years.

Do you characterize yourself as a Western writer?

I'd be more inclined to say that than science fiction writer, absolutely. Even when I'm writing other things, mainstream or science fiction, landscape is so important to it. I think that that's one of the distinguishing marks of the Western writer, that landscape is taking the part of a character in the work we do.

Do you see Western writers using the landscape more than, say, Southern or European writers?

Southern writers often do use the landscape to a great degree. I don't know that I would say that western writers use it more, but certainly that's one of the things that distinguishes Western writers. For me, the [landscape and what happens in a story] are inextricably linked. I can't imagine Wild Life being moved somewhere else and being the same story. Same with The Dazzle of Day, where the landscape inside the biosphere is on a Costa Rican analog and the landscape of the planet they arrive at is Icelandic in character. But the landscapes are enormously important whatever they are. They're part of what's happening in the story.

Are there any other aspects that are as important to you as landscape while writing fiction?

Community is another thing that interests me a great deal and I think I see it a lot in other Western writers. It may be small communities, five or six people, or it may be the larger community, but the questions -- What is community? How do you form it? When you form it, does that create a boundary? And who's left outside? -- interest me a lot. The way in which people communicate or learn to speak to one another. I think these are questions that may have arisen out of the West where there was such isolation and continue to interest those of us who live here even though most of us don't face those kind of actual physical situations.

You live in a city…

I do. People don't realize the West is the most urbanized region of the nation. We have these vast distances but most of us live in the cities. As soon as we get outside the city we enter what is fundamentally a wilderness, an enormous, largely empty landscape. This isn't true in the East. We took a long car trip -- one of the only long car trips I can remember-- around New England, and we were almost never out of some sort of community. It's like in Europe; you just go from one little village to the next. Most people don't live in the biggest cities, they live in some little community at the edge. You hardly ever get out to a place where you're in the wilderness.

In the west, that's what you experience: city, then 100 miles of wilderness, then another city.

None of your books have been set in contemporary times. Was this a conscious decision?

I don't know that I was conscious of it in the beginning but I am now. I write about the past and I write about the future and I've thought about that a great deal and wondered why I'm drawn that way. Part of it is that it's hard to imagine the kind of adventurous and heroic things that I like to write about happening down the street from me -- it's easier to put them in the past or the future. As a reader those are the kinds of books I'm drawn to. Most books about today seem to me to always be whining and whimpering about baby boomer angst and dysfunctional childhoods. I just find that so very boring.

Your books could be called romances, using the old definition for romance -- an adventure. Have you ever been tempted to write a straight-out modern romance novel?

I've been tempted to write a novel in which a romance occurs. The book I will probably be working on next may well have a romance at its center. It's set on the Long Beach peninsula in Washington State in 1915. The tip of the peninsula is a wildlife refuge now. It's a wintering-over place for a couple of species of birds, and a stopping-over place on the migration route, so there are thousands and thousands of birds who stop there in spring and fall. The book is partly about a woman who is a graduate student in ornithology who is doing a field study of the birds at Ledbetter point. So I can dig around a little bit into the question of who tried to get into the fields of science at that time -- when it was so very hard for women to do so.

Are you the kind of writer who has a routine?

I used to have that, very much, I don't now. When my son was in school and my husband was working, I wrote five days a week from about eight in the morning until about four in the afternoon. There was an hour in the middle for lunch and to work on a crossword puzzle, and stretching. It started at four days a week and the fifth day was the day I would use to do the grocery shopping and all the other things I was letting slide the rest of the week. As the writing became more and more important, even that fifth day got pushed aside. So then I was writing five days and doing the laundry at night or on the weekend.

At what point did you decide you wanted to spend a lot of time writing?

I started writing a little bit when my son was born -- I was 29 -- and then got really serious about it a couple of years later.

The plan was to take five years off when my son was little. I'd been working and quit to raise the family. I started keeping a pretty desperate journal when my son was little. I had postpartum depression and he was colicky and that's where it started. Then the desperate journal slowly segued into writing fictional anecdotes, little bits and pieces of things. They were probably actually stories about dysfunctional childhood and midlife angst [laughs]. Stories in which the principal character is a woman rocking her baby late at night and counting the change in her pocket and wondering how far it would get her.

As I began to write more and more of these fictional anecdotes I got more and more interested in the idea of writing. About the time my son was starting kindergarten I read about a competition for an unpublished writers to write a Western novel and the winner would be published and get $5,000. I decided I would do that. The deadline was the end of March, so I had six months to write this book. I thought, not having a clue, "Oh, I can do that. I can write a novel in six months -- four hours a day." [Laughs] But I did! In the last month I rented an electric typewriter and transcribed it and edited it as I went. Of course it went up to six, eight, 10, and 12 hours a day. I just ignored my son, let him run around the house like a crazy person, and typed this novel. I mailed it on the afternoon of March 31.

It was a perfectly terrible book I'm sure, but it taught me a lot about writing. I think you learn to write by writing and I pretty much taught myself to write by focusing on it every day for six months. After that, I was ready to commit to being a writer and I started writing short stories. I sold a short story within a year. From that point there was really no turning back. My husband was willing to support me in the most fundamental way, which was to say, "Keep on writing. You don't have to go back to work, we'll get by." We never had as much money as our friends. He was blue-collar, but we got by. We'd been getting by and we just went on getting by and I started writing all the time.

What are you reading at the moment?

I'm reading a book about an ape who learned to communicate called Kanzi, The Ape at the Edge of the Human Mind. I just finished reading Alan Gardner's Strandloper. It was a strange book. I just reread Carol Emshwiller's novels. I read The Amazing Adventure of Kavalier & Clay, which I loved.

Do you have books you always recommend?

There's a handful. I always recommend Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony. I love that book. A book I love a lot but everyone already knows about it, is Toni Morrison's Beloved. The book that people don't know about that I love is Carolyn See's The Handyman. That's a book I think is heroic in a traditional sense. There's a male hero who saves people's lives -- people in crisis! His method of heroism, fundamentally is changing the dirty diapers and catching up the laundry, and changing the bandages. It's an amazing twist on traditionally heroic novels. I also loved Pat Barker's Regeneration, another beautiful book.

Do you have a favorite local bookstore?

Looking Glass Books is probably my favorite local bookstore, although I also love Broadway Books. Looking Glass is downtown, and when I was downtown that was the one I wandered into. Portland is full of independent bookstores. We used to have even more, but we still have quite a few.

Wild Life

Read an excerpt from Wild Life

Search for Molly Gloss's books on BookSense.com

Molly Gloss on tour:

September 16, 3:15-4 p.m.
Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Convention
Oregon Convention Center
Portland, OR
Autographing

September 18, 7:30 p.m.
Elliott Bay Book Company
101 South Main Street
Seattle, WA
(206)624-6600
Reading & Signing

September 19
Kirkland Public Library
308 Kirkland Ave.
Kirkland WA 98033
425-822-2459
Reading & Signing

September 24, time tba
Capitola Book Cafe
1475 41st Avenue Capitola, CA 95010
(831) 462-4415
Reading & Signing

September 26, 7:30 p.m.
Annie Bloom's Books
7834 SW Capitol Hwy.
Portland, OR 97219
(503) 246-0053

October 11, time tba
University of Oregon Bookstore
895 East 13th Avenue
Eugene, OR 97401
Reading & Signing

October 15, 7 p.m.
Bloomsberry Books
290 E. Main
Ashland, OR 97520
(541) 488-0029
Reading & Signing

October 18, 7:30 p.m.
Tattered Cover
Cherry Creek
Denver, CO
303-322-7727
Reading & Signing

October 19-21
Mesa State College
The Readers Festival
1100 North Avenue
Grand Junction, CO 81501
(970) 248-1020

October 23, 7:30 p.m.
Oregon State University Bookstore
300 NE Walnut
Corvallis, OR 97330
Reading & Signing

Further Reading

Karen Joy Fowler
Tim Parrish
Lois Lowry
Luis Alberto Urrea

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