Molly Gloss Script

DMAE ROBERTS: I’m Dmae Robers and this is a special Oregon Treasures Edition of  Stage and Studio…with funding from the Regional Arts and Culture Council …Oregon Treasures features veteran artists and arts organizations that have made an impact on the state.…  today I talk with one of Portland’s esteemed authors, Molly Gloss who has focused her career writing about strong women of the American West. Molly Gloss was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for American Fiction for The Jump-Off Creek about a woman who homesteads in Oregon in 1895 and won the James Tiptree Jr. for her novel Wild Life about an early 20^th century feminist in Washington. Her newest work is The Hearts of Horses—the story of a young woman who breaks horses in Eastern Oregon.

So much of Gloss’ work features women in the rural West, and a lot of it is from the late 1800s to the early 1900s.  I asked about her fascination with that time period and about setting her novels in the Northwest.

MOLLY GLOSS: Well I think I’m writing about the time and place I’d be living in were I living a different life. Does that make sense? I’ve grown up reading the literature of the American west, and that’s where my heart is. And that landscape is the landscape of my heart. My dad’s from Texas, and when I was kid, we drove back and forth to Texas every summer. And I’m sitting in the backseat of the car looking out the window at this western landscape while I’m reading these cowboy novels in the backseat. So I think it really imprinted on me. But I’ve been doing in some way is writing the novels I couldn’t find in the library, the novels of the west that involve stories of the women, which were largely untold, and the novels about the heroism of ordinary lives.

Because I think that a lot of my novels, at their heart, they’re really still cowboy novels. And it’s just that I hope that I’m presenting a different sort of mythology about the cowboy that maybe emphasizes community and the feminine side of things rather than the lone cowboy hero that rides off after saving us all with his gunplay. Martha at the beginning of The Hearts of Horses rides into the valley the way cowboys heroes have ridden into the valley at the beginnings of countless cowboy novels, including many Zane Grey novels. But she doesn’t ride out at the end of that novel the way Shane did, for instance.

DMAE ROBERTS: Did you find that this time period allowed women to be more than a wife or a mother, not there’s anything wrong with that, but to just break free of their own boundaries at that time?

MOLLY GLOSS: Well it’s a challenge certainly for me as a writer if I want to write a novel that some adventure in it, and I want to put a woman at the center, it’s a challenge to deal with the question of marriage and children. In Wild Life, Charlotte has five boys, but she leaves them behind and goes off on an adventure. And in Jump-Off Creek, Lydia has no children. It’s a difficult balancing act, figuring out how to deal with those questions if you’re wanting to put a woman at the center of an adventure. But it is true, and has been little-written about that women in the west, in the late 19^th century and early 20^th century, women actually had lot more power in a sense and were much more equal partners with their husbands, especially in the rural areas of the west. They had to be. They had to be helping their husbands with the ranch work and the farm work in a way that has been little remarked upon in fiction. So there’s that. And with The Hearts of Horses, Martha is a girl who is breaking horses, which is not something that we think of as girl-work. And I initially thought that she would be a rare bird. And I set the novel in World War I, thinking that because all the boys would be gone to the war, that that would give her an opportunity to do boys’ work. But when I began to do the research about that, I discovered that there were in fact lots of girls who were breaking horses in and out of the war. It was a chore that often got left to the girls and women on a ranch. On a family ranch for instance, it was often the daughter who was designated the horse-breaker. The father and the sons would be off dealing with the cattle, and they would say to the daughter, “Hey, you get these horses ready for us.” So it was not unusual for the girls to have these kinds of jobs.

DMAE ROBERTS: In addition to the strong women in Gloss’ novels, her writing is also laden with rich historical details.

MOLLY GLOSS: I was a history major in college. And the research is great fun for me. I really love the research and I’m sort of an obsessive researcher. I probably know a hundred times more things than actually appear on the page. My feeling about that is, every time I have to chose a detail to use out those hundred things, the detail I choose will be interesting enough and unique enough that it will give readers the sense that this is somebody who knows the other 99 things. In The Jump-Off Creek, I actually started that book without doing any research at all. I thought that I knew what I wanted to do, that I was writing a book about a homesteader, it’s just that instead of the man being the homesteader and the woman being the sister or the daughter, that she was going to be the homesteader, and that I could easily write a western novel around that. But when I began to write that, I discovered I really didn’t know very much about what kind of nineteenth century woman would choose a solitary homesteading life, because I realized after twenty or 25 years of reading western novels across the spectrum, that I did not really have, I had never encountered single women homesteaders. And I didn’t’ really know much about the woman’s role in the west. So I stopped what I was doing. I stopped writing. And I spent a whole summer just reading, reading the private writings of women in the west, the diaries and letters and journals of women in the west. There are not very many written by homesteading women because these women were pretty darn busy. So to come in after a long day and write about it was something that didn’t happen very often. But I did find lots of things by independent women in the west and I found lots of memoirs by women who were writing about their girlhood, riding alongside their dad, working outside with their dad, and discovered that there were lots of single women homesteaders, that in fact one in five homestead claims was filed by a woman, and woman had a better rate of proving up on their homesteads than men did. So when I went back to the book at the end of the summer, I was able to begin to write Lydia’s diary, which I had not had in the novel before then. But as soon as a wrote her first diary entry, it was if she had sat down next to me and started dictating this book to me which was a great gift to me. So most of the research for Jump-Off Creek was the reading of these women’s private writings. I’ve done a lot more research of other kinds of things for other novels, for Wild Life and Hearts of Horses.

DMAE ROBERTS: Is there a lot of that in your blood, in your ancestry, of the women? Were they pioneers, were the homesteaders?

MOLLY GLOSS: All four of my great-grandmothers were women in the west, certainly. I know a little about each of them, and each of them has an interesting story if I knew a little more. Two Texas grandmothers, one of whom had 12 children, the last two of whom were twins. And she named them Y and Z. I think that might have been a message to her husband. She was married to a well-driller in Texas. The other grandmother was actually the first white child born in (indistinguishable), Texas, which is an interesting thing to me. I’m a fourth generation Oregonian, and it occurred to me a while back that if I lived in Texas, I could say that I was a fourth-generation Texan, because of my dad’s heritage and his grandmother having been born in Texas. My Oregon great-grandmother, actually one is Washington state, not Oregon. She had married a man who was a Civil War veteran, and he was killed in a fall from a horse and then she married another man who abandoned her after they had several children. And she wound up in Walla Walla taking in people’s laundry to survive. They had been ranching in the Walla Walla valley. And the other woman was a German immigrant who came across the west in a covered wagon as a child a married a man who was a nursery man in Fort Vancouver and the family story at least is that he had planted all the trees that lined the officer’s row in Vancouver and in the cemetery there.

DMAE ROBERTS: Is that where you grew up, in that area?

MOLLY GLOSS:  I grew in rural Gresham, when it was still very much countryside, strawberry fields, and raspberries and pole beans, which is what I did every summer, picking those crops. Very much countryside back then. It’s not anymore.

DMAE ROBERTS: You didn’t have horses?

MOLLY GLOSS: No. We were poor. My friends and neighbors had horses, and I rode a lot when I was a kid. But I never had a horse of my own.

DMAE ROBERTS: Forgive me for that. I just think everybody assumes that you have a horse in your backyard.

MOLLY GLOSS: They do. They do assume that. And I get a lot of email from horsewomen who assume that I’m one of them, and it’s a little bit embarrassing actually. They’ll say to me something like, “I’ve just come in from feeding the horses, and it’s an ice storm, and it’s really awful out there, but you must know what that’s like.” Well, no. No I don’t know exactly because I don’t have to be out feeding my horses in an ice storm.

DMAE ROBERTS: Lydia Sanderson, the heroine of The Jump-Off Creek, chooses to homestead by herself in the backwoods of Oregon in 1895. Molly Gloss writes about a certain freedom for women in the American West that they couldn’t find in the major cities.

The descriptions of the homesteading life in The Jump-Off Creek have a certain intensity and authenticity to them that it is often pain-staking and gut-wrenching.  The book dramatizes just how difficult it must have been for homesteaders. I asked Gloss how she achieved that level of reality and emotion.

MOLLY GLOSS: Well I think Lydia is a lot like some of these women that I read about in that life is certainly hard. And she doesn’t deny that it’s hard. Or that it’s lonely. But what she gains is independence and that was something that women in the east—and Lydia comes from Pennsylvania—that women there that hard time of getting hold of any kind of independent life. There were often the possession of their husbands or their fathers. So women who came west, lots of them came west looking for that, looking for the feeling of making their own decisions. You balance that against the hardships. Writing about her life I’m living it a bit. I think she’s braver than I am. But I think it’s a life that I would have wanted to choose for myself maybe.

DMAE ROBERTS: Molly Gloss seems to have a different style of writing in each of her books, especially in The Jump-Off Creek.

(READING WITH MUSIC HERE)

MOLLY GLOSS: The style in The Jump-Off Creek I think of as pretty sparse in a way, certainly the dialogue between people sparse. These are people who arent’ very verbal. And in The hearts of Horses there’s a lot more talking going on, and people are more relaxed, I guess I would say. But let me read you a couple of paragraphs from Jump-Off Creek. This is not long after Lydia comes to her homestead propertly that’s bought sight unseen. In fact, this is the first morning as she’s waking up after the first night in her little cabin.

Across the rim of the coffee cup, she looked at Angell’s place. Another ridge rose up along the south, steep and high as the one behind the house. The Jump-Off creek ran between them, along the flatish bottomland where Angell had cut his crossties. It was a narrow clearing, a hundred yards wide at most, running up and down the banks of the crick, maybe twenty acres all together of weeds and grass and thin saplings and brush growing among the stumps. Where the brush pen was and in front of the house, nothing grew. It was all mud and rocks and deep tracks of men’s boots, horses’ shod feet. There were slick, muddy trails at the near edge of the crick, too, where they’d come for the water. Lydia stood and stared at all of it for quite a while. She had spent some of the nights sleepless on the bare bunk, folded up on her mother’s windmill quilt fitting her bony hip and shoulder into a gap where two logs joined. And in the darkness, lying a long time awake, listening to the dripping roof and the rats chewing the garbage in the yard she had begun finally, stubbornly to tally the work. It was an old solace. Her mother hadn’t ever liked her to list them like that, all the things needing doing, ranked from worst to least, first to last. You’ll make the heart go right out of you. But Lydia had always liked to see the whole shape of her work. When there was time for it, and paper, she would write the jobs down, and afterward mark a line through every one as it was finished. In the blackness last night, inside the cold, stinking house, she’d made that list against her cold eyes inside her head, going over it slowly, and over it, getting the order right. Now in the gray daylight, standing, looking at the mud, and the high, wet weeds, looking at the whole shape, all the things needing doing, she felt her heart tighten up like a fist.

DMAE ROBERTS: You’re listening to a special Oregon Treasures edition of Stage and Studio. I’m Dmae Roberts featuring novelist Molly Gloss. You can hear the entire show at kboo.fm/stageandstudio or find the link and photos of Molly Gloss at the Stage and Studio Facebook page.

Gloss, a history major in college, loves research. She not only studies the time-period, but reads the fiction of the time.

MOLLY GLOSS: I read quite a few novels written by women, the kinds of novels, the romantic western fiction that women wrote back then. In fact, lots of women were writing those novels from about the 1880s into the 1920s until men sort of took over the field of the western. Lots of women were writing them. It was okay for a genteel woman to take up a writing life because it was something she could do in the home, close to the nursery, and close to the kitchen. And they were interested in writing those kinds of romance novels about cowboys, really. And so that’s something that I read a lot of when I was working on The Jump-Off Creek.

DMAE ROBERTS: That must have been fun.

MOLLY GLOSS: It was fun. And I actually collect them, so I have quite a few of them that I actually own. But they’ve gotten more and more expensive, which is the good news. They’ve gotten discovered. And these are women whose work had fallen completely by the wayside, in the decades since. But now they’re being valued, and scholarly articles are being written about them and so on. So that’s the good news.

DMAE ROBERTS: In The Hearts of Horses then, life is a little bit easier in that it’s 1917. There are the beginnings of modern conveniences, cars and telephones. So people aren’t living that day to day survival as much. They’re not facing death everyday. But there is still a hardship in that, in choosing to be a woman who does something that is so traditionally male, which is breaking horses. And she does it in such a way that isn’t what you think of as breaking horses. It’s more she’s a horse trainer really. Were there a lot of women that did that kind of work?

MOLLY GLOSS: The germ for this novel came from an oral history in Theresa Jordan’s book Cowgirls: Women of the American West. She did a series of interviews with ranch women all over the Rocky Mountain West. And there’s an interview in there, an older woman who’s talking about her childhood in the 1910s, during World War One. And she talked about these women, these girls who break horses as if they were pretty common. She said in those days there were girls who came through the country breaking horses. And when I began to do some of the research about horse-breaking in the 1910s, I found lots of evidence that girls and women were pretty commonly doing that kind of work. So it’s interesting to me that very little of that has ever been written about. You don’t see girls breaking horses in very many novels about the west. And certainly they weren’t present at all in any of the typical Zane Grey, Ernest Haycox, Louis L’Amour kind of novels.

DMAE ROBERTS: And so many people I think that book especially has so much about community. And you get to see so many different lives in this community, different households, different families, and really feel like have a different story. They could each have a book written about them.

MOLLY GLOSS: The people for whom Martha is breaking horses, each of them really has their own separate story. And the novel ties itself together by Martha riding from one to the other in a circle, and her interactions with each of them.

MOLLY GLOSS: It’s a circle ride. She has a couple of horses at each of these various farmers around the countryside. And she’s breaking them all at the same time. I keep using the word breaking, even though I know that today’s horse trainers would approve of that term. But that’s the term that Martha would have used even though her methods were not bucking them out. But once she’s got them saddle-broke, she’s got to ride them everyday to get them really finished. So she starts out at one farm in the morning riding a particular horse, and she rides the few miles to the next farm, and puts them in the corral there, and saddles the horse that’s waiting in the corral, saddles that horse and rides him to  the next farm, and so on around the circle until she winds up back at the first place, at the end of the day riding a completely different horse so that everyday all the horses get ridden a little bit and continues that day after day. It makes a very nice metaphor for the book, and a nice structure for the book, and also allows me to talk about the lives of all these people on the circle.

(READS FROM HEARTS OF HORSES)

MOLLY GLOSS: This is I guess a similar piece in that it’s Martha on the first evening that she’s at the Bliss Ranch getting ready to sleep in the barn. She’s chosen to sleep in the tack room in the barn.

On ranches she’d worked for, it was never expected she would sleep in the bunk house with the men, so when she was too far from home to sleep in her own bed, she’d often been put up in the ranch house, and she’d slept in some pretty poor conditions, one time for several weeks sharing with two children with no mattress, just a spring with gunnysacks filled with straw and a couple of wooden fruit boxes under the spring so it wouldn’t sag down to the floor. She had gotten in the habit of asking for the barn which was at least likely to be quieter and more private. This year, before heading out on her own, she’d sown together a sleeping bag made from a wool blanket, and a piece of felt, and an old fur rug. In the newspapers, she’d read about the British soldiers in France who were sleeping in mud, and had only a couple of thin blankets to keep them from pneumonia so she didn’t think she had any grounds for complaint. The candle cast a high shadow but it was enough to read by. She was making her slow way through Black Beauty, a page or two at a time, too tired most nights to read for very long. Tonight, coming to the part where Beauty meets his old friend Ginger, in terrible condition from bad treatment as a cab horse, she shut the book and blew out the candle and then went on lying awake, looking on into the darkness. Gradually, the saddles and the other things took dim shape around her, and the smells of the fur rug and saddle soap, leather and hay, the warm clean, fecund smell of horses arose out of the cold darkness, and were a comfort against a yearning that was not homesickness.

DMAE ROBERTS: Author Molly Gloss reading from Hearts of Horses. I’m Dmae Roberts with a special Oregon Treasures edition of Stage and Studio.  I was surprised to learn that Molly Gloss became a published writer later in her life but has accomplished five books, two of which are science fiction.

MOLLY GLOSS: I think that’s one reason I like to write about the past, or the future. I also write about the future. And I think that it’s all a continuum. But that’s one of the things that attracts me to writing about those times is transporting to the past, a time travel thing.

I have a sort of reputation in that world through those stories. And I wrote one science fiction novel, The Dazzle of Day, which actually won the PEN West Fiction Prize, which is rare for a science fiction novelist. It’s a very literary science fiction novel I have to say. And also I like to tell audiences who are there because of The Hearts of Horses, I have to tell them, “You know, The Dazzle of Day is just like all my other books. It’s about people who are farming, people who are forming community, people who are working hard and working with their hands, and it’s about the same kinds of things that my other books are about.”

DMAE ROBERTS: Well I’m buying your science fiction novel. I read a little bit that you wrote, but I didn’t go into it as much. So definitely I’m out there. I’ll be one of the readers that reads both. I’m happy to do that. And I love that you have this whole other life as a science fiction writer, too.

MOLLY GLOSS: What’s interesting is that people who read science fiction are willing to read anything. So my science fiction fans will read all my novels. But the people who read the period novels are not so willing to read the science fiction. It’s a classic problem, isn’t it.

DMAE ROBERTS: Kinda interesting.

MOLLY GLOSS: It’s a little bit like that problem of women reading both men’s and women’s novels, and novels about men and women, whereas men mostly read only novels  by men about men. It’s the same sort of problem.

DMAE ROBERTS: Very interesting.

MOLLY GLOSS: It’s very interesting and I don’t really see a difference there. I think it’s all a continuum and there’s just as much imagination required to imagine the past that no longer exists as there is to imagine a future that has not yet existed, that the skills required for the writer are very much the same.

DMAE ROBERTS: How old were you when you published your first novel?

MOLLY GLOSS: Gosh. My first novel was actually a young adult novel called Outside the Gates, which has been out-of-print for thirty years, probably. Almost. It was published in 1986. So I guess I would have been in my early forties at that point.

DMAE ROBERTS: I think that’s very inspiring for a lot of women. And your story particularly, because I go to a lot of writers conferences. And they seem to be predominantly women of a certain age. And I guess what kind of advice would you offer women who are at this point middle-aged and not published but who really want to be writers. What kind of advice do you give them?

MOLLY GLOSS: Well it’s the same advice I’d give anybody wanting to write, no matter what your age is. First, be a reader. I think all writers begin to be writers by first being readers. So you’ve got to reading a lot. And you should first be reading the kinds of things that you want to write. If you want to be a science fiction writer, you should be reading a lot of science fiction. And other than that, you must write to please yourself. That’s the first thing. And only secondarily think about whether you’re writing to please others. And if you’re not writing to please yourself, you’re probably going to be unhappy because getting published is a really difficult road. Many writers will not ever be published, or not published as much as they would hope. And so you need to be doing because you love, and not because you expect to write a bestseller and get famous.

(OUTRO)

Author Molly Gloss talking with me at her Portland home.

For more info about upcoming readings or her works, go to mollygloss.com. I’ll also have links to this interview at kboo.fm/stageandstudio as well as the Stage and Studio Facebook page.

I’m Dmae Roberts…This has been a special Oregon Treasures edition of Stage and Studio featuring veteran artists, writers and organization in Oregon. Produced with funding by the Regional Arts and Culture Council.

Music featured today was Black Twig Pickers from the Free Music Archive Dot Org, Cornelus Cardew from Ubu Web Sound at Ubu.com. And Portland’s own Foghorn String band at Foghorn String Band Dot Com.

That’s Stage and Studio this week. Next week, I’m featuring Sarah Slipper and James Canfield of the Northwest Dance Project plus a special feature by producer Steve Greenberg … Till then, I’m Dmae Roberts…