By Lorna Reese
Special to the Weekly
Award-winning regional novelist Molly Gloss will read from her work in progress on Thursday, April 18, at 7 p.m. at Woodman Hall. The reading is sponsored by the Friends of the Lopez Island Library and SHARK REEF Literary Magazine. The event is the highlight of the Friends’ annual meeting.
“In most of my novels, I’ve written about women living untraditional lives in the Pacific Northwest,” said Gloss, “but my new book is about a young man who heads down to Hollywood in 1938 to find work as a wrangler and stunt rider in cowboy movies. This means I’ve been groping my way into a story told almost entirely from the point of view of a 19-year-old male and a story that takes place almost entirely in southern California. It’s new territory for a woman writer whose native ground is the Pacific Northwest.”
Gloss’s first book “The Jump-Off Creek” features a hardship-honed widow homesteading in the backcountry of Oregon in 1895. It was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, as well as winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award and the Oregon Book Award.
Her second book “Wild Life” is about an outrageous early-twentieth century feminist, a cigar-smoking, trousered, bicycling, scandal-embracing mother of five sons who supports her household in the Columbia River town of Skamokawa, Wash., by writing adventure stories and scientific romances featuring intrepid girl heroes. This book was awarded the James Tiptree Jr. Prize in 2001 and was the 2002 selection for “If All of Seattle Reads the Same Book.”
“In The Hearts of Horses,” Gloss explored life in a remote area of eastern Oregon in the winter of 1917 after many young ranch hands had been called away to war. Her protagonist, young Martha Lessen, has an unusual, quiet way of breaking horses.
About her current book, which she will read from on Lopez, Gloss confesses it came slowly, haltingly, together.
“Now,” she said, “I must wait patiently to hear what others think of it, and that’s the really hard part. Reading from an unpublished work can be scary, but sensing the reaction in the audience is a useful part of my process. Among other things, it soothes my urge to grab strangers by the lapels and tell them this story I’ve been living with, carrying around in my head, for five years.”
The Lopez Library regularly sponsors readings by regional and national writers and SHARK REEF (sharkreef.org) delights in co-sponsoring these events. A second jointly co-sponsored event is the upcoming poetry reading on April 25 at 7 p.m. at the library to commemorate National Poetry Month. Poet Gayle Kaune will read along with two SHARK REEF poetry co-editors, Tom Aslin and Gary Thompson.
