Giles featured poet for upcoming OPWC gathering
Posted on Sunday, September 28, 2008
"Love your life. This advice was given me by Grace Paley and it's the best advice I know."
- Molly Giles Prize-winning fiction writer and professor Molly Giles from the University of Arkansas will entertain the crowd for Ozark Poets and Writers Collective. She will feature at 7: 30 p.m. sharp Tuesday at Nightbird Books in Fayetteville.
Molly Giles splits her time between Fayetteville and Woodacre, a small town on the West Coast of California.
"I consider myself between dogs, but have always had cats, presently a Siamese-mix from the Fayetteville shelter with crossed blue eyes," Giles says.
At 7 years old, her first story was "some boldly plagiarized [illustrated ] tale about a virtuous princess and a wicked witch," she said.
Her mother showed it off to an artist friend who was in Jungian analysis. When the friend explained that it was very clear the witch was her," my mother locked herself in the bathroom weeping and I had to stand outside the door and say I was sorry," Giles says. "Writers do that a lot."
"I tried to be a poet all through my 20 s," Giles says. She started writing short stories through a correspondence course in her late 20 s and it remains her real love. A sense of curiosity inspires her to write.
Giles started her undergraduate degree at University of California at Berkeley but dropped out to get married. It took 18 years to earn a Masters of the Arts from San Francisco State.
"I married young, divorced young, raised my daughters while going to school and working as a secretary to seven psychiatrists, each crazier than the next," Giles says. "It was a wonderful job for a writer. I read all the patients' files and did everything I quietly could to monkey wrench the bad influences of the doctors."
After teaching creative writing at San Francisco State University for 17 years, a friend asked Giles to apply to the Creative Writing program at the UA. She did it as a lark. While she was here, a dusting of snow made the city look like the setting of a fairy tale.
"The people who would be my colleagues were nonstop story tellers with huge personalities and generous spirits," Giles says. "They were also great cooks."
Giles made the decision to stay and has been teaching at the UA for nine years. She is a student favorite in the English Department for classes in Magazine Fiction, Prize Fiction, and First Novels as well as MFA and undergraduate workshops in short story and novel writing.
Alice Munro and John Cheever top the list of her favorite writers. This semester she is teaching the works of Jeffrey Eugenides, James Salter, Deborah Eisenberg, Miranda July, Lorrie Moore and others "with a touch of Tolstoy and a nip of Nabokov thrown in to raise the bar," Giles says.
Giles advises that aspiring writers "claim the large and small events that make the way you look at life unique and POETRY write from that. Take everything you've got and use it."
Her awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The McDowell Colony and Yaddo, two Pushcart prizes, the Bay Area Book Reviewers' Award and The National Book Critics Circle Award for Book Reviewing. She is also a freelance editor and has edited the novels of Amy Tan.
Giles has two collections of short stories. "Rough Translations," published by the University of Georgia Press, was a Flannery O'Connor Award winner. "Creek Walk and Other Stories," published by Scribner, won the Small Press Short Fiction Award and the Commonwealth Club of California Silver Medal. Her novel," Iron Shoes," was published by Simon and Schuster. She is currently working on a sequel to "Iron Shoes"and has finished a new collection of short stories. She has recently placed stories in The Pinch, Copper Nickel, Santa Monica Review, Cimarron Review, Literal and Blackbird.
Next spring, Giles will be the visiting writer at The Rope Walk Conference in Indiana and at Simpson College in Des Moines, Iowa. Her agent wants to pursue a two-book contract to sell her short story collection and the novel that is still in progress. In the meantime, she continues to send out and publish stories from the collection.
Giles has three grown daughters - a newspaper editor, a geneticist living in Amsterdam and an assistant district attorney in California. She also has four grandchildren, the oldest a junior at UC Davis, the youngest a "3-year-old redhead who babbles in Dutch."
Join OPWC for the exciting fiction of Molly Giles. Open mic performances run up to four minutes of original work or a "cover. "Performances are not censored and strong or racy language is sometimes used. Admission is free, though a hat is passed for the feature. There's also a free raffle for a book from the UA Press and a Nightbird Books gift card. For more information, visit www. uark. edu / ua / mmasull / opwc.
Keep an eye out for news of Arkansas State Poetry Day, which will be hosted by Northwest Arkansas for the first time ! Friday, starting at 6 p.m. at the Staybridge in Fayetteville, we will be entertained by Kelly Mulhollan as he performs songs from his Never Ending Conversation CD, to be followed by Fayetteville's poet laureate, Clayton Scott. Saturday, the meeting will feature Michael Heffernan at the Courtyard Marriott in Fayetteville as well as the awarding of the state's annual poetry prizes. This event is free and open to the public.
Cat is a nontraditional undergraduate student in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Arkansas, and lives in Durham with her husband, two sons, a pug and 30 chickens.
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