Where the wild things were: Writer Molly Gloss discovers wonder in a small Washington town
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KAMOKAWA, Wahkiakum County — This little town sits on the lip of the Columbia River at the point where the river's mouth widens to meet the sea. Its valleys are riven with creeks and sloughs. Water seems to permeate the very air — the name of this Washington settlement means "smoke on the water," after the mists that perpetually overtake the place.
It's in this waterlogged corner of the world that Portland writer Molly Gloss chose to set her prize-winning novel, "Wild Life," the saga of Charlotte Bridger Drummond, a smart, foolhardy turn-of-the-last-century woman who goes searching for a lost child in the deep, dark woods. What happens next turns into a beautiful and tragic meditation on nature, both human and animal, the varying souls of women and men and the necessity of recovery from unspeakable sorrow.
"Wild Life" (Mariner, $14) has been chosen for Seattle Public Library's "If All Seattle Read the Same Book" program, a community-wide discussion of one book that kicks off this week with appearances by Gloss around Seattle.
On a recent visit to "Wild Life's" setting, Gloss pointed to a modern-day catwalk set on pilings, shielding her eyes against a rare sunny glare coming off the water. Skamokawa pioneers "built those pretty much on their own. The homes were connected to the boatbuilder, the boatbuilder was connected to the grocer," Gloss says, building a latticework of bridges over the flooding, ebbing tides.
Gloss doesn't look a fig like her fictional creation. The Portland novelist dresses in Oregon-earth-friendly tones with a neat gray haircut to match. Charlotte has wild, flyaway hair — she hates it when her children pull it — and favors trousers, a circa-1905 affectation guaranteed to shock the locals.
Gloss was raised in a working-class family. As a child, "I thought all authors were dead," she says. Charlotte learned literature at the New York Public Library, a place where America's Gilded-Age literary lions liked to hang out.
But nick the surface, and likenesses emerge.
Both women are writers of science fiction, fantasy and the frontier West. And both Gloss and Charlotte show a certain, shall we say, inventiveness in their work. Most writers would think twice before populating a novel with a family of sasquatches.
Stunning success
Being tapped as featured author for Seattle's program is a big deal for a small-town Oregon girl who grew up not knowing there was such a thing as a bookstore. Gloss says she was "pretty stunned" when told "Wild Life" had been picked, given the august company she has joined: Past "If All Seattle" authors have included literary icons Bill Moyers, Russell Banks ("The Sweet Hereafter") and Ernest Gaines ("A Lesson Before Dying"). "On the other hand," she says with a sly smile, "maybe it's time they picked a girl."
And maybe it's time they picked a Northwest book. "Wild Life" is so Northwest it squishes. It's set in the early 1900s — Skamokawa's Golden Age. The then-booming town was called "Little Venice," an apt name for a place where there's a very porous dividing line between land and water. Men made their living cutting down trees and fishing. Women stayed home, tended the kids and scraped the moss off the roof.
But not Charlotte, and not Molly Gloss, though it may have seemed like it was going to turn out that way.
Gloss was raised in Gresham. "We were poor," she says bluntly. Her dad worked on the railroad; nobody in the house read much except for the Louis L'Amour-type westerns her father consumed. "I never thought about writing," she says. Her husband, Ed, was a truck driver. She worked intermittently as a teacher and as an office clerk. They had a son. Gloss, after some fragmentary writing during a post-baby blues period, started writing in earnest the year her son was 5.
A turning point
She sold her first piece of writing to Calyx, the Oregon literary journal, for $35. Then, in 1981, the year she turned 36, she was accepted into a writing workshop taught by Ursula K. Le Guin, the legendary science-fiction-fantasy writer who lives in Portland.
The assignment was to write two stories in 10 weeks. Gloss, who calls herself a slow writer, was so panicked she wrote and tucked away the first one before class even began. "I was a housewife," she says. "My friends read romance novels."
It changed her life — to have someone like Le Guin say, "you are a writer ... " Le Guin is a superb teacher, she says, able to "look at really bad writing and pull out the one sentence that really sings — she knows how instantly to make it much, much better."
That was the beginning of a writing career defined by the interests of Molly Gloss, not by what's conventionally "literary." Her first book was a young-adult novel written as an adventure story for her son. Despite considerable literary acclaim, Gloss has continued to write in styles and genres not much thought of as "serious" literature.
Her book "The Dazzle of Day" was a science-fiction novel. "Wild Life" won the James Tiptree award for best science-fiction or fantasy book to explore issues of gender — James Tiptree was the pen name for Alice Sheldon, a woman who wrote as a man because of the belief that women couldn't write "hard" (read: technical) science fiction.
At home in the genre
"The Jump-Off Creek," published before "Wild Life," has its roots in the Western — its hero is a woman settler in Oregon's Blue Mountains, a place Molly and Ed explored by driving their truck across the state and camping out. Gloss still writes science fiction — she'll publish a story in Isaac Asimov's science-fiction magazine later this year.
Gloss counts as influences writers like A.B. Guthrie and Willa Cather, who helped define the western experience, and science-fiction and fantasy writers like J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Asimov and Walter Miller, author of the science-fiction classic "A Canticle for Leibowitz." She says science fiction and fantasy allow her to explore moral, ethical and scientific questions. "You can take metaphor right to the edge," she says. "You can do that in a way you can't with mainstream fiction."
In Charlotte, Gloss created a sort of writerly alter ego for herself. She "conceived a notion" to write a novel about a woman who wrote science-fiction adventure and fantasy in the Jules Verne mode around the beginning of the 20th century. Charlotte, a single parent who writes to feed her five children, is based on several real-life authors — some of whom, like Charlotte, combined writing with mothering in the days before frozen vegetables and washing machines.
Written mostly in diary form, "Wild Life" follows Charlotte's account of an incredible adventure that climaxes with a visitation from several Bigfoots. It begins when Charlotte decides to travel to a remote logging camp near Yacolt, Wash., to help search for the missing 6-year-old daughter of her housekeeper. Charlotte gets separated from the search party and badly lost. What happens next is moving, sad and best left for the reader to discover.
A sobering change
Gloss traveled hither and yon with Ed to research "Wild Life," from their cabin at Long Beach to Ape Caves, a location south of Mount St. Helens said to be the locale for a sasquatch sighting in the 1920s. Now she's trying to recover from a sorrow all her own — Ed died two years ago. She hasn't been able to really develop a new novel since.
"I'm not the same person I was" before her husband died, she says. Before he died, she had started a novel set on the Long Beach peninsula. She recently has begun another one, set in eastern Oregon.
Gloss has a great attachment to her characters. After she finishes a novel, she goes back and reads and rereads a manuscript until she feels she can let them go.
On her recent return to Skamokawa, she seemed to be revisiting Charlotte — pointing out the spot at the mouth of a slough where she located Charlotte's farm, the route of the road where Charlotte would have bicycled into town, even the spot tucked under a local farmhouse roof where Charlotte's boys looked for a mother cat and her kittens.
A world of possibilities
But what about those sasquatches?
It was a sunny springlike afternoon from another world — the area's perpetual mists had been burned away, which exposed some prodigious clearcuts in the hills, bringing to mind Charlotte's gloomy prediction that "As the woods are daylighted, and wilderness gives way to modern advances in education and technology, I expect to see the end of the Wild Man, exactly as faeries and gnomes disappeared with the encroaching of the cities in Europe."
But beavers grazed in the silvery waters of the sloughs; geese huffed and squawked overhead. Four notoriously shy Columbian white-tailed deer gazed unblinkingly back at a trio of humans. And almost a century later, Molly Gloss was not ready to give up on the possibility of wonder.
"I want to live in a world where it's possible to believe in Bigfoot," she said, though "we're on the cusp of a world where that's no longer possible."