Molly Giles

Interviewer: Do you do you remember the very first story you ever wrote? I don’t care if you were five. It was the first story ever.

Molly Giles: I didn’t write stories. I tried to write poetry and I was awful at it. And I wrote poetry until my mid twenties, never got anything published. I had my first poem published maybe five years ago and I had another one published last year, but I was bad. I wanted to be like T.S. Eliot. I wanted to be, you know, deep. And then in my twenties, I took a correspondence course on the short story. I was living in Sacramento, didn’t know any people who wrote, let alone anyone who read. And I took a correspondence course from Berkeley and wrote a story, and that was my first story. And it got me a scholarship to Squaw Valley. It got published, and then the magazine went belly up right away. I got $300, but I never saw the magazine. And but it got me a scholarship to Squaw Valley. So that’s.

Interviewer: The story.

Molly Giles: The story was about a girl and her mother and it was about a girl very much sort of what Aimee writes about. But it was a 15 year old girl, very, I guess, angry, disappointed with her mother for not taking better care of the grandmother who had sunk into dementia. So it was a three generational story. So that was that was it. I have no idea. Even know what the title was. I’m sorry. It never came and never got published. But but I wrote it on a correspondence course class, so. And I gave up poetry.

Interviewer: So do you remember that? Did you what was the feeling when you started writing the short story when it was like, Oh, I think this is where you were. Where did it take someone else? Or did you feel that it was better or better?

Molly Giles: Oh, it was such a relief. My poetry was so bad, my poetry rhymed. Okay, that’s just for starters. Now, it was such a relief to be able to write a sentence that had a period at the end of it and yeah.

Interviewer: Yeah. Well, so I’m just curious for how many stories how many stories have you written?

Molly Giles: Oh, gosh, I never have counted. I have. Four published collections and a fifth one that my agent won’t show till she sells my novel, but probably 100. I don’t know. And most of them have been published. Yeah, there’s a lot of I’ve written a lot of stories.

Interviewer: So what, where where do these stories get published?

Molly Giles: How little literary magazines I’m very impressed with. San Francisco. This is a I would love to give of a plug. It’s a sort of the Paris Review of San Francisco and University magazines. I’ve never published in The New Yorker. I’ve never said anything to The New Yorker, actually. So mainly the university presses.

Interviewer: Yeah, well, this business of being a writer, it’s. It’s it’s such a unique thing. It seems like everybody has such a unique story in terms of how they end up writing and and how do you make a life out of it? How do you craft a life out of it? I wondered at what point was there a point where you said, okay, I’m going to make this my primary consideration and I’m going to try and craft a life around this. So you talk a little bit about that time in your life and what it was.

Molly Giles: I always meant to do that. Are you kidding? I always thought, Oh, well, I’ll just write. I won’t do anything else. I’ll create do nothing but but write and you can’t. I’m sorry. I was a single mother with three children. I got an NEA that, gosh, I can’t remember 1987 or something, and it was $20,000. So I went straight to my boss at San Francisco State and said, I quit. You know, I’m just going to write. I have $20,000. Not realizing that 4000, of course, immediately went to the government and I had three children at home. So, you know, that wasn’t really smart. But that’s what I’ve always wanted to do, is just write. So in answer to your question, I do believe that for single mothers, at least who are working, the idea of creating your life around your art is a pipe dream and well worth following. If you live long enough. So I can’t go any further than that. My first collection came out with the University of Georgia Press, and a fellow from the press called me and said that they were going to nominate me for a Pulitzer Prize. I think presses can do that individually. And he asked me what when I started college, and I told him, you know, 1960. And when I finished, I told him 1978. And he said, that’s a lot of unaccounted for time. And I thought unaccounted for time. Yes. Three kids, two divorces, 17 jobs, four moves. Yes, it’s unaccounted for time. But that is the reality when you are writing and you’re not going to make a living writing short stories, believe me, that’s not nor poetry. So that’s what I was interested in, was short stories. And you had asked where I published, and I totally forgot that my very first published story, the one I got in a magazine, came out in Playgirl. Excuse me? Yeah, Playgirl. Not Playboy. Playgirl. And they changed the title of my story. My story was called Old Souls, and they changed it to Night Christ and they printed it printed it in silver ink on black paper. And it showed a woman like David Bowie screaming with two different eyes. And I had to cut the story out, Colin, by column to show it to my family, you know. So that was my first experience getting published, and it really was not an ecstatic experience. I mean, I was thrilled, but it wasn’t something I really wanted to show people. I couldn’t show my mother, you know, tell I’ve done it.

Interviewer: Window shop so good of okay, so you talk and you just mentioned a lot of jobs along the way. Let’s hear about those jobs.

Molly Giles: Okay. So my first after the divorce, I cleaned houses for quite a while. That was not a fulfilling job. I think I got $2 an hour. Then I worked for a janitorial service as a secretary and in the afternoon I started working for seven psychiatrists. Seven were in county psychiatrists. That was a gift from God because on my lunch hour I would take the files and I would go up to the lunch room and I would read everybody’s problems, which the doctors would write down in transcript. They didn’t. This was back in the seventies. They wrote everything down except for one doctor. I would get the file out and all it would say he was into wine. All it would say is two cases, Zinfandel, three cases of just Chateau de Neuf. But mostly I could get everybody’s secrets. And it was delightful. I have to admit, I was never able to make a story out of that, that I worked there for seven psychiatrist for seven years. And I could do that when my children were in school and. And I could walk there. It was I lived in and I could walk to work. And so. So that was a good job. And then I started teaching at San Francisco State. I was a graduate student there. My professor got ill and they needed somebody to finish the class. So they asked if I would just step in and I was there for 17 years. So that was sort of a fluke. I didn’t I never meant to teach. I didn’t think I had any qualifications to teach.

Interviewer: How did you navigate this? This. You know, as I mentioned earlier, how did you navigate the work of a teacher in the work of a writer? Can you talk a little bit about that?

Molly Giles: Well, teachers get three months off every year. And I did most of my writing in July. Teaching at San Francisco State was and probably still is not an easy job. I had four classes a semester. I had one one spring, I had 17 theses to oversee and grade. So I didn’t do an awful lot of work during the school year. To tell you the truth, I was also working as an adjunct at that time at UCSF. I was also writing book reviews. My house was in foreclosure. I was working very hard and I was doing private classes with Amy. So yeah, so I was writing took sort of a backseat. I always did it, but mainly July. God bless July. Well, this is July, right?

Interviewer: Well, you mentioned the Squaw Valley Writers Conference. Could you could you help? Could you just give me a general history of what it is, where it started, and how you got connected to the Squaw Valley Writers Conference?

Molly Giles: Well, Oakley Hall wrote a book that your dad starred in, Down Downhill Racer, and Oakley Hall as the founder of Squaw Valley Writers Conference. And it is up in Squaw Valley. And I had gone there as a scholarship student twice. They give scholarships. I’d gone on the first story that I told you I sold about the mother, the grandmother in the daughter. And then I went again as a film, a film student with a story I’d written about working at the psychiatrist. And then when my book came out in 1985, I got asked to teach there. And that’s actually when I did meet Amy. And I had been teaching at San Francisco State, but I was still pretty new to teaching. I made some previous mistakes. I went after a story of the young, beautiful Jennifer Egan’s, and I misinterpreted it. And but I was brilliant. I really, to this day, don’t think I misinterpreted it. But I kept hammering. I noticed that she was getting more and more uncomfortable. And finally she got up and left. I think she was something kicked in at the time. It’s one of those things I’m not proud of, but it’s set up in Squaw Valley. It’s beautiful. It’s was at that time a week long conference. Famous writers were there and Ray Bradbury was my favorite. And it was just a magical place. And that is where I met Amy.

Interviewer: Have you continued to stay connected to scrub?

Molly Giles: I taught there for several years afterwards. They haven’t been using me since, but. Yeah, several times. Yeah.

Interviewer: So. Do you? Yeah. Speaking of Amy, do you recall the first time you met her? Do you remember what that was? The first time.

Molly Giles: I was teaching. And we at Squaw Valley, and we had Wednesday afternoons off and Wednesday afternoons with no workshops, no nothing. So we thought it would be fun to take a tram up to the top of the mountain and walk down. And I had been so nervous about going to Squaw Valley for the first time, teaching that I had overpacked. I brought a million outfits, and I left them all. Oh, I forgot them. I left my suitcase and it fit. So when I got to Squaw Valley, for some reason, I was wearing a white jersey skirt and a sweatshirt. So we went up and I had at least I had tennis shoes, walking shoes. So a bunch of us took the tram up to the top of the mountain. I didn’t know Amy. She was in the tram with us. Russell Banks was in that group. Al Young was in that group. We got stuck. We got up, we got off the mountain. We were with a guide and we had one of those electrical storms you have sometimes in Tahoe. It started to hail and the lightning was going and our guide yelled to get below the tree line. Well, everybody scattered and ran. Our guide, who said he knew the mountain like the back of his hand, did in the winter. He was a ski instructor. He did not know how to get us down in the summer. So it took us maybe two or 3 hours to all of us. Bad riders. I mean, we’re all good riders, but bad athletes. None of us were exactly in shape and we edged our way down the ravines. And when we got to the bottom, this charming little Amy Tan, who I knew her name was said, who unzipped her fanny pack and pulled out a single cigaret. Now, if I’d had, we’d been crawling over crevices. If I’d had cigarets, I would have been smoking them steadily. She just pulled out one cigaret and I thought, That’s an unusual person. I wonder what she’s like. She wasn’t in any of my workshops, but the next day she felt that I had. We’d been through something together and she asked if I would take a look at her story. And I did. And I loved it. And it was a mess. And I still loved it. It was a oh, a lot of it was in her mother’s voice and there were a lot of different stories in it. And I remember saying to her, you know, this would be wonderful. You should break this into 12 separate short stories. And Amy said my favorite word as a student. Okay. And she did it. So that was our first our first meeting. And that was in 85, 1985. So so that was that was very I remember they took a picture of this white jersey skirt of mine was had been hailed on it, had mud on it, had blood on it. It was just sort of dragging around my ankles at that point. But Amy looked perfect and then that one cigaret perfect. So.

Interviewer: Okay, so let’s follow it because I was going to get to that in a little bit. But this business of how it went. Okay. So I’ve read, I’ve tried to do my own work and I’ve got the sense that the Joy Luck Club was was unusual in how it emerged that there was I think Amy had written maybe a couple. Do you remember when at this point in time, when you read her stuff and you suggested this great thing going into these stories, had she published anything yet? I think I remember I’m under the impression that there were like maybe three existing stories or maybe a few got published before. But what you just introduced is the central structure of joy that so. So tell me. So does this mean that you were there at the start? And how did did you then become sort of a regular mentor to Amy at that time? And and was it supposed to be a I’m sorry, I’ve asked you a lot of questions and comments, you know. Okay. What did I ask was at that point with the idea to do a series of 12 short stories, or was it a book because of the idea of making those stories? And, you know, can you bring us along?

Molly Giles: I’ll try and bring you along on it. At that time, Amy was a technical writer. I believe she worked for IBM. I could be wrong on that, but she hadn’t really written fiction. So she was brand new to it. And I came back after Squaw Valley, and I believe Amy and another friend of ours, Audrey, tried to start a writing group in San Francisco to work on their work a little more. And they ended up in a group that was all, oh, they didn’t call them men. They called them boys. A bunch of boys who all wanted to be Hemingway. There’s a lot of heavy drinking, and there was a lot of fight stories. There was a lot of sports stories. And Amy and Audrey didn’t feel comfortable in it. So they got in touch with me, or Andy took me to lunch in San Francisco and asked if I’d be willing to. Lead a class and I believe we started in 86. I could be wrong. I’m not sure of my time either, but after that I started leading a class. I think I charge $25 for each member and we met mainly at Amy’s house and she was then crafting short stories, which later became the Joy Luck Club. And it was a group of Oh, there was some. It was a wonderful dynamic. That’s all I can say. It was it was one of those happy times when you’re a teacher, you can have classes that just don’t work, and other times you have it was just harmonious. It was wonderful. And so Amy started doing short stories. And I think Amy will agree with me that the Joy Luck Club is a collection of short stories. It was marketed as a novel that is essentially a short stories. She published one in a little magazine that I recommended. I think it just came out of San Francisco, but somebody picked it up and published it without her permission or knowledge in Italy. And I think she published another one again in a small, small magazine. And I got a phone call from a an agent whom I had never met named Sandy Dykstra. And Sandra asked me if I knew of any promising writers, and I mentioned three of them. But Amy was the one that she picked up on. And she was a dynamic, really dynamic in terms of crafting, getting Amy to craft it into more of a salable book. So because I never think in terms of book, I think in terms of short stories, so, so that’s how it started. And it happened fast after that happened very fast.

Interviewer: Do you prior to all of this, as you were teaching Amy and she was writing short stories, did you did you have a sense then of like what her motivations were? How much we how much were you aware of your own personal narrative? Did she talk about her family much?

Molly Giles: And she talked about her mother. Her mother was very dynamic. She mentioned once that she had been seeing a psychiatrist and that when she talked about herself or her family, her psychiatrist fell asleep. And so I don’t think she was telling him the same story she has since told us. But no, Amy was a she didn’t talk much about her, her background. It came it came through her, her fiction. But in person, she was just as happy to talk about, you know, food, you know. So she was she was no, she wasn’t as heavily invested in it as she became. But her mother’s voice, that was the voice that really drove the stories, the early stories, drove the jury like clip. What’s that? Mother’s voice?

Interviewer: Yeah. Did you during this time that Amy was developing herself as a writer in the circle, did you meet her mother at that point?

Molly Giles: Yeah, I did.

Interviewer: She was your first. Tell me about meeting Daisy.

Molly Giles: Daisy was a quiet, well-dressed. Shy woman who said about her daughter that she she writes, that’s I don’t remember having a conversation with Daisy. She was Amy took wonderful care of her. She seemed loved, but she was not a dynamic personality. So she she ruled in her family, but socially, no. She was a quiet woman. So others might have different opinions, but that’s what I remember she did.

Interviewer: So that’s great. That’s so interesting. So were you just doing all this stuff, you know, looking back on it? And you you you mentioned that the Joy Luck Club was watching stories that sounded like story came in and then things move quickly. Do you recall conversations with Amy as she went through this transition of of being a writing student who’s writing these short stories? From what I understand, very little notion that she was going to become a literary figure. She was writing, and she describes it like if she was to project out where she thought what her trajectory would be, it would have been a modest version of the trajectory of the short story she would have if I could just publish one story in.

Molly Giles: My life that’s really, you.

Interviewer: Know. So that’s an enormous change. Would you remember? Were you in touch with her during this time? Oh, yeah. Could you describe what it was like for her to journey from sort of that that. I would I would maybe say to sort of the lack of pressure, the purity of just writing these stories to suddenly having to deal with the outside world.

Molly Giles: I can’t imagine that anybody could have dealt with the phenomena of success that Amy was buffeted with very quickly. And she was still she had written the Joy Luck Club. I think maybe I could be wrong, but three months, really. She sat down and she met her deadline. Her house was being oh, maybe it’s the house next door that was being something was being remodeled. So there was a lot of noise. She lived in San Francisco. She sat her basement with those gloves that have no fingers on them. And she she wrote, just as she had always written for any job she’d ever had, she went at it like a job. Then when the book came out, the group and I came to a party, the book launch her house was filled with orchids. There were thousands of people there. Amy was sort of stunned. Her mother was in the kitchen. Everybody was sort of hiding. And I did actually write a story about that phenomena called The Joy, the Blessed and the Blessed Among US, because everybody in the group was so happy for her. There were about eight women in that group and there was no envy. I didn’t see any envy. What had happened to Amy was such a phenomena, you know, it was so sudden, it was so big, and she handled it so well. So it’s good manners, it’s graciousness, it’s genuine interest in people and an ability to adapt. And she just she was groomed for it. Somebody took me aside and I think it was one of Sandy’s aides and said, do you think it will be okay in New York? You know, think Lou will do. And I thought, yes, Lou will do. There was very interested in how she would handle the social onslaught. And I really I cannot think of anybody else who would have. What you said was what Amy, what you asked was whether Amy had to go from being a writing student to being a star. She was always and still is a student. And that is one of the most wonderful things about Amy. That’s what grounds her. So she’s a student now and drawing. She’s a student in life and she keeps that openness and she kept being in the writing class for years afterwards. I worked with her on four other books afterwards, maybe five. She always has been humble and she’s always been willing to learn and try and better herself. So there hasn’t been any arrogance with this, which I think is another reason why nobody was envious of her. We were just pleased, just very pleased. To me, the whole experience was joyful and lucky. I have nothing but happiness. Thinking back on those days, we would sit in a circle and Amy would read a story and I would make little notes. I think some of them were highly irritating to her and I’d take them all, and others would correct too. And then she would do a finished version and get it out there. So it was amazing. It was fun. It was fun.

Interviewer: That’s incredible. Do you feel? What? What’s what’s it? Could you could you talk a little bit about. She talks in the opposite French. She talked about the pressure of the second book. She’s very curious about it. Self-effacing, very humble about it.

Molly Giles: Did she talk about the pressure of the third, the fourth and the fifth? I think the second book was a piece of cake compared to what came later.

Interviewer: Well, listen, you’re about this thing.

Molly Giles: With.

Interviewer: Gestures and obstacles and what has been what’s been hard and what’s been hard for me?

Molly Giles: I don’t know. I mean, meeting deadlines, I think perfectionism, trying to to make it the best she can. She, like all writers, has taken a lot of false starts. She’s written several beginnings of books that I still would like to have write one about an orphan named Yearning that I miss. I’d like to see that book printed sometime. She wrote about missionaries in China. There’s a lot of false starts, I guess she would call them, but they’re very rich in material and there was just pressure to keep doing this. Plus all the tours, she went on. I mean, I have to I have to guess. She must have enjoyed it. A lot of. I may be stepping over bounce here. A lot of Amy’s good news comes from trying to please her ancestors, if that makes sense. Her. Father who had passed away that she wanted to be proud of her. Amy has always felt in touch with her father and older brother that she adored, that she wanted to be a good person for her and her mother. So a lot of Amy’s, what seems like self service has been actually, I think in service of her family wanting them to be proud of her. So I, I have never talked to her about this. So that’s how I’ve read it.

Interviewer: And so so that gets expressed by going out there. And if someone asks her to speak or she does it, she just says, you.

Molly Giles: Can’t believe any.

Interviewer: Documentary filmmakers. Right?

Molly Giles: I’m not doing this for my mother. She would be horrified.

Interviewer: So I just imagine, you know, how do you like, you know, in rock and roll? So many, so many bands, best albums is their first one and everyone knows this. And it seems to be this kind of weird curse when you have a blow away first thing. Did she talk at all about that?

Molly Giles: She didn’t know. She just was pushed to do it. So it was something that she felt she could do. The second book is my favorite. That’s the Kitchen Gods wife, and that really wasn’t that difficult for her to do. She had a lot of material she hadn’t used, and I really like that book. The Bone Setters Daughter, I believe, came next. Each one had a timeline on it. The Valley of Amazement was the last novel I worked with her on. And that was a mess. Putnam’s. Had a change of editorship and they dropped her. She went with Echo Press. Her deadlines were not being met. There was I think it was just a huge relief. A huge relief to get that over with. And the other is she just works like a dog. Can you say that? I’ve never seen a dog work. I just lie around and lick themselves. So anyhow. But yeah. So you’re going to have to ask her about her work ethic. She always had me cracking the whip behind her. I was always, always, always giving her deadlines, telling her she had to turn in 30 pages by this time. And she always tried to please. Now, that, again, is part of her masochistic ability to try and please adults older. I mean, I’m an older I’m ten years older than she. And she just had respect. And if I would say I want I want to have Chapter 11 by Tuesday, it would be there. It would be in very rough draft, which I would then tear apart, sent back to her. But it would be there. She always met her obligations. Yeah, I so.

Interviewer: I didn’t quite agree. My my impression is that therefore, from the very start, the writing was shaped by contracts, commissions, expectations. You know, had she ever written a novel completely free from any of that where she just wrote it with no publisher, you know, had nobody paying her on the front end to do it or contractor?

Molly Giles: Oh, no, no. There was always, always some obligation that she had to meet. I didn’t work with her on the book that you mentioned, the fates. It’s opposite effect. And I didn’t work with her on this last one, which Dan worked on with her. So I don’t know about those. I may have seen parts of both books at different times. No, I didn’t see anything with the darn book because that’s mainly emails. But it’s it’s been a job, that’s all. It’s just been a job for her in many ways, not without not without pleasure. But I think towards the end, she was a little weary of having to perform, having to perform and having too often to write, being expected to write the same book over and over again. So the Joy Luck Club was so popular. Let’s have the Sun of Joy Luck Club. You know, let’s have Joy Luck Club. But she didn’t do that so well. So but those are questions to ask her change. She’ll tell you that I was quite a taskmaster, but she responds to that. So if you have somebody who’s actually going to respond, I had three daughters, they didn’t I’d say, do this to that. But Amy would say, okay, I love that word. So that’s it’s that’s wonderful.

Interviewer: So we talked about gender a little bit. I mean, having having read your work, I think I can see how and hearing you just talk about your your group and then hearing you say that Amy found herself in a writers group that didn’t necessarily resonate for her, this idea of of the women’s experience in this world and what it means to write from that experience. I think if you’re writing for me in reading the stories as a reader, I felt like there were. I got there were. It shed light onto feelings and dynamics that I don’t think were I’ve experienced before because I was getting this kind of feminine perspective initially, particularly in in in the look of, you know, looking from a woman’s view. I have to say, I was unsparing towards men at times. Oh, yeah. But I really reckon really honest. Yes. That’s what I have to admit. Right. If you talk about writing as a as a woman and do you feel that that’s a specific genre of writing that should stand alone on its own? Or this is just fall under the canon of good literature and good writing? Because, you know, one of the things that that Amy gets dinged for is, oh, she’s she she never writes. She she really trashes Martin. But I don’t know. I feel like when I was reading her writing, I think, well, men are taking a beating. But you know what is? It’s true. It’s true. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about this issue of writing from that. And you and Amy shared and maybe with me, do you feel like that’s a what do you like? Would you would you like to be considered a feminist author or a women’s author, or do you want to be associated as a writer?

Molly Giles: That’s an easy question to answer. Of course, I don’t want to be labeled as a women’s writer or in a wimp. They used to have women’s magazines and I have published in McCall’s and Redbook and women’s magazines, and I prefer Esquire almost always. There’s great stories. And growing up, I fell in love with Philip Roth. I fell in love with Saul Bellow. I fell in love with John Updike. The women in those books are cripples, whores, psychos. They are awful, awful women. And I got very upset about this. And I wrote a story called The Writer’s Model, which was about a woman, a normal woman who comes in and sits among a group of male writers who all have their their leather patches on their sleeves. And they all take notes. They ask her questions because they don’t know anything about women. And what they eventually want to know is, is she wearing underpants? It comes down again and again to sexuality. And I think I was angry for years because I loved these writers. They’re brilliant. I just love them. But why did they have to have so many ill informed women that why is there no real flesh and blood woman in them? So I thought, well, they need to talk to a woman. So that’s where that story idea came out of that. I have we were talking about whether I could write a set about an immigrant. To me, men are foreigners. So to be in the company of to be in the brain of a man, I have to make that man elderly or ill for me to understand him. That has helped a lot. Most of my male characters, the nice ones, have been on the verge of death. And and I found that as people age, they do get nicer, you know. So that’s.

Interviewer: Yeah.

Molly Giles: So but whether that’s true of Amy or not, she adored her father. She adored her brother. So I don’t know why she trashes the men in her stories, but she does. I think it’s just simply because we can’t do it. Some writers or some painters can’t do hands, so they always have somebody standing with their hand behind their back or in their pockets. And I think some writers can’t do the other sex. So.

Interviewer: So so this is getting back a little bit to the conversation we had about the immigrant experience. But in the opposite of the film, Amy talks about not wanting to be confined to the ghetto. And she talks about. She tells a story about going to conference where a lecture was sort of celebrating the idea of being marginalized from the mainstream as a badge of courage and that there was great power and honor in being marginalized. And she tells this story and she says, this is scary to me, you know, as is something to aspire towards. And she and I wondered, you know, whether it was from a feminist point of view or otherwise. Do you have you counseled so many writers and you’ve taught over time so much? Do you see and Amy talks about that, is this sort of emergent pressure of if you are an ethnic writer, you have a responsibility to do certain things in the.

Molly Giles: Way best be hired.

Interviewer: Can you talk about your feelings about all that?

Molly Giles: Well, I just I just think the whole idea of writing is to express everything that you see or know. There’s a new book I would like to read by Ocean Vuong. He’s a Vietnamese writer. That is supposed to be universal. I’ve just heard about it. I haven’t read it yet. When I was teaching in Arkansas, some students asked to have special after school classes. One was old guys and one was old women, and they felt freer being in their own group. The boys were writing about baseball and and the mafia and sex, and the girls were writing about mom and relationships and their periods. And it was great. Each group had wonderful writers in it and each group had beautiful stories coming out of it, but they sort of worked better separately in terms of working with. I have to say it, I haven’t met many black or African writers, American African American writers or Asian writers in creative writing classes in universities, because they are there to learn a skill that will get them through life. And it’s not writing. Writing is still a touch that’s frivolous. So after they become lawyers and doctors, they will come to one of my classes and want to write their book. But first, they’re they’re not there to express themselves. They’re there to learn and survive. So I haven’t had many. That’s the truth.

Interviewer: Yeah. Interesting. So, you know, when you think when you think now about teaching and writing and this, you know, the life you led over the years, can you identify certain qualities or traits that that writers share or do you feel like it’s such a hard? It’s so hard. You know, I mean, I can only speak to being a screenwriter for almost 20 years. And the more time goes by, the more I can’t believe I ever get it. It was the hardest time in my life. Really? Yeah. It’s really hard for me. A lot of just labor isolation. You have to really want to be alone, you know? So it’s.

Molly Giles: Tough. Yeah. But who wouldn’t want to be alone anymore?

Interviewer: Well, certainly a long time, we realize. Wait a minute. Well, I think.

Molly Giles: One maybe that’s one of the advantages of these writers groups, because you write alone and then a lot of writers I know get together. There’s the grotto in San Francisco. There’s different places where writers like to congregate, even though they’re doing their work separately. But they do need their social. They do need to get together and share their work or go to readings. But I don’t think writing is hard. I think writing. I don’t think riding is hard. I think wanting to make it work. It’s hard, you know, trying to perfect it. It’s hard and it takes time and it’s slow. I don’t understand why people want to be a writer, but it’s not really hard and it’s not really, you know, they used to say all you have to do to be a writer is just, you know, slit your wrists or write with blood. But that’s ridiculous. It’s it’s easy. It’s just it’s time consuming. But what isn’t?

Interviewer: So do you do you think were you talking about. What would you say? Someone said there are certain qualities or certain kind of traits on personal level that would end. Like if it’s in someone’s nature would be is of great benefit to whether you’re writing after you become a lawyer or whether you really to struggle with kids and figure it out and, you know, make it work in a very hurried environment, whatever that is. It’s just the desire to tell stories.

Molly Giles: That’s it. That’s it. You just said it. It’s the desire to tell stories and the tenacity not to stop. It takes tenacity. It’s a certain you go you want to you want to work with that a little more. You want it to make you say what you wanted it to say. It’s a it’s a stubbornness. I’ve always thought that for a writer, you need to have, you know, an imagination like a hummingbird. You have to have an imagination. But then you have to have a a stubbornness like a burrow. So you have both the the the curiosity and the interest in life and then the real stupid peasant stubbornness to make it work. And so it takes it takes both to be a writer, as I probably with any art. I wish things just could come effortlessly, but they don’t. But it’s not hard. Jamie. She still takes effort.

Interviewer: Of some of that last person, if you were to guess. No, I mean, from your point of view. Because what do you think? What is any secret sauce? What what do you think is the thing that she just has that she couldn’t that that she then policies to Jim that’s that makes her unique or what stands out to you about Amy.

Molly Giles: She’s so many faceted.

Interviewer: So you.

Molly Giles: Know so what makes Amy a unique.

Interviewer: Writer you refer to her by her name? Yeah.

Molly Giles: What makes Amy a unique writer? What makes Amy a unique writer? She’s multifaceted. She’s interested in so much, and she’s. You’re going to hate this. Dutiful. She’s dutiful. She has an idea, and she dutifully follows it out and and she explores it with her imagination, and she sticks with it. And I think that is a quality of any successful writer, but very much so with Amy.

Interviewer: So and you mentioned this this is my last question, and then I’m going to let you say anything I haven’t talked about. But Amy, you mentioned earlier that she sort of opened doors for you. Could you elaborate on looking back on it now? Like what would Amy’s impact? Why was she an important role model or figure? Well.

Molly Giles: She’s physically so attractive, you know, that she was. And so there. So she was. Help me with this photograph, you know what I mean? She was photogenic. Photogenic. And I remember when the Joy Luck movie came out. Now, the Joy Luck movie probably did more for her than the book. And it had all beautiful Asian actresses, and it was the first one of its kind that I can recall. And so it opened doors for. Oh, gosh, a lot of writers, Lisa, see, comes to mind. She may have been writing before. And Catherine Lau, there’s a lot of Asian writers that have since been able to. They felt like they were given permission or maybe just been given permission to write about their lives. So I really this again, I think, would be questions better answered by Amy. I really don’t know.

Interviewer: Is there anything else that I haven’t brought up today? I mean, this has been wonderful. Your insights have been fabulous that I haven’t asked you that you’d like to say about your working relationship with Amy and her creative process that I haven’t asked you.

Molly Giles: She when we would have the workshops as a critic and everybody would read their work and I would usually tear it apart. Annie was a critic in a way that I wasn’t. I’m very interested in sentences and how characters feel and how they behave. Amy would be looking at the big picture and she’d be looking at the logic. So a lot of her contributions to the group were based on how she sees things in a larger way than I’m smaller. She’s bigger on that. And no, the other thing I can think about was the group that any always a noisy food and she would always eat potato chips or green apples when other people were reading. And she always salted her fruit. We would just stop and stare. I’ve never seen anybody salt their fruit. And that was that was the most interesting thing about it. So sorry. That’s the only thing you didn’t ask me about fruit, you know? Can you think of anything? Can anybody else think of anything? I can’t.

Interviewer: I really appreciate your time. Question Have you ever heard her answer as to Janet? Have you ever seen her band?

Molly Giles: Oh, yes. Oh, so so let’s talk about the band for a minute. Thank you. So I always felt that the dominatrix role that Amy plays was partly based on me in the writing group, because I would be the one saying, Lie not lay, lay, not lie. You can’t do this. You have to do this. She’s out there with her whip. But for what Amy has told me is that as a child in classes and very dutiful and quiet and good to come out and dress like she’s harsher and just carry a whip, it was so liberating for her. There was one time when her husband crawled on stage and she kicked him and broke his collarbone. He fell off and broke his collarbone. But even that he was such a good sport about. But she can’t sing. Can she sing? No, she cannot sing. Does she care? No. Does she practice? Yes. And is she fun to be with? Yes. And it works, you know. So I just love that. Okay. That again, it’s not being dutiful. That’s just looking for the fun of it. You know, a lot of life is just looking for the fun of it.

Interviewer: So John’s question prompted me to remember something about support. Have you been? Have you been? Tell me what you know of her art, if you’ve followed her. What have you seen on that front? I mean.

Molly Giles: Oh, I think it’s.

Interviewer: Can you talk about what you know of that?

Molly Giles: Well, she she and I. I have some of my books over there that she inscribed, and one of them is inscribed with a little drawing of a cat and mouse that’s off her dog. We’ve not talked about her dogs and her dog. And and it’s just a beautiful little pencil sketch or ink sketch. And I thought, wow, she’s really gifted. And recently she started to do birds and she’s always loved animals. So I’ve watched these bird drawings go from something you would find to just, you know, a circle in a line into something exquisite. She’s paying more attention to detail all the time. So she is real team multi gifted, maybe not a singer. Okay, but artist writer, definitely.

Interviewer: This is about five or six. What do you see? And when you think about doing something, something without expectation, you know. Do you see this drawing is something that is fulfilling in that regard, do you think?

Molly Giles: Oh, I think it centers her. I mean, Amy has always had to write or do everything with expectations with people behind her saying, come on, let’s make a book, let’s do this, let’s do as a short story writer. I’ve never had expectations. And you learn to work without expectations just for the joy of it. You know, I think Amy is unusual in that she’s had more expectations than any writer I’ve known. So. So I think just drawing the birds. Plus, she loves animals. She loves birds. So have you seen her worm box?

Interviewer: No.

Molly Giles: We will ask her for the worm bug. She just wear gloves, but she picks out the best worms for her. She’s a little eccentric.