AUTHOR

Molly Gloss

The highlights of my writing life: In 1996 I received a Whiting Writers Award, which is sort of a MacArthur grant in a minor key. People told me the Whiting was a prestigious award but hardly anyone knows what the heck it is, so I wonder how it came to be prestigious?! Probably from the substantial chunk of change they drop on your head without warning. ("Substantial" of course being a relative term. It's not MacArthur substantial. But we paid off our house...) The Jump-Off Creek, about a woman homesteading in the Blue Mountains of Oregon in 1895, was winner of an Oregon Book Award and a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. The Dazzle of Day, my only science fiction novel, received the PEN West Fiction Prize and was a New York Times Notable Book. Fairly unusual for a science fiction novel to win a major PEN prize, but the Notable Book thing, not so much--it was Notable only within the ghetto of science fiction. Wild Life, set in the woods and mountains of Washington State at the turn of the 20th century, won the James Tiptree Jr. Award for literary fantasy, although at the time I wrote it I didn't think I was writing anything fantastical. The Hearts of Horses, about a young woman breaking horses for some farmers and ranchers in Eastern Oregon in 1917, has (so far!) been the most popular of any of my works. Is it that attention-grabbing cover? or "horses" in the title?! Guess we'll test the second theory, as I've decided to call the new novel (launching Oct. 28, 2014) Falling From Horses. Set in 1938, it's the story of a young man working as a stunt rider in Hollywood, making cowboy movies. And if you've already read The Hearts of Horses you will know the significance of this factoid: He's Henry and Martha's son.

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