Faculty and Visiting Faculty

 

Molly Gaudry

Assistant Professor, Creative Writing
Molly Gaudry is the author of the verse novels Desire: A Haunting and We Take Me Apart, which was a finalist for the Asian American Literary Award and shortlisted for the PEN/Osterweil. She holds master's degrees in fiction and poetry, and a PhD in experimental prose from the University of Utah. She is the founder of Lit Pub.

FACULTY INTERVIEW:

What genre(s) do you write in?

My first two books are novels in verse, and my new book coming out is a memoir-in-essays with a novel, or the idea of anovel, inside it. Generally speaking, you could say I’m a cross-genre writer. But at Stony Brook I tend to teach nonfiction and poetry courses. Summers, I teach fiction at the Yale Writers’ Workshop.

What is the thing that excites you about the act of writing?

Pushing against the boundaries of genre in fresh and exciting ways…. It's not like literary innovation is new. A lot of writers who have stood the test of time could be said to have innovated on what their predecessors and contemporaries were doing. So for me, the question is how do we innovate today? Which of the rules we’ve inherited should we resist or break and why? How do we establish new forms relevant to our time?

Do you feel like your work is in conversation with other writers or work? If so, who/what?

When it comes to nonfiction, I'd say my work has long been in conversation with those who have been or continue to be champions of the lyric essay. But there's a healthy number of writers doing that kind of work now. More recently, I've invested a lot of time and energy thinking about and writing speculative nonfiction. (Check out the Speculative Nonfiction magazine online.) For me, currently, spec nonfic is one of the more interesting approaches to rethinking what nonfiction can be. 

What is your writing process?

I'm not an every-day writer. I've always had to fit writing around other responsibilities. Luckily, because I’ve been in school or teaching for so long, my full-time responsibilities have usually provided some kind of release in the summer. A lot of my work has been generated in those months. Once that draft is down, revision has happened very, very slowly over many years.

How do you generate ideas?

I tend to work with constraints. If I were to walk into class and have everybody write a ten-line poem about a tree, everyone would have a different tree in mind and a different way of thinking about and describing it. But I think your tree?That was the tree you were always going to write if you were ever going to write about a tree. The constraint just helped you excavate it from the darkness and get it onto the page. Constraints help me find ways to articulate whatever it is that I cannot otherwise articulate when facing a blank page. After enough of those little exercises, maybe there’s a narrative, maybe a character's voice has emerged. So I just try to pay attention to what’s working, and keep building from there. 

How do you manage when you get stuck?

I started this game-thing with my friend, the writer Kirsten Bakis. We text each other prompts, usually just a word. For us, it can be hard to want to make time to write, but we’ve found it's fairly easy to find the time to reply to each other’s texts. It’s low pressure and there are no expectations. Because it worked for us, I started doing this with other Stony Brook faculty, Susan Scarf Merrell, Bobby Crace, and JP Solheim. I think Bobby might have started doing it with other friends of his, too. So, there's something about it that seems to work for people. And all you really need is one other person to get started. 

Inspiration or perspiration?

Perspiration. Once I get enough constraint-generated text on the page, I try to pay attention to it, to be looking. Usually, there’s just a lot of noise, a lot of useless material, but try to search for that sliver of a character appearing or the nuance of the way something that came out is phrased, which might suggest the possibility of a voice emerging. The work is figuring out what is there, what is working, and how to begin to shape it?

If you weren't a writer, what job would you have?

There was a time when the answer would have been dance, but by now I would definitely be retired. For a while I got super obsessed with miniatures and that felt like something that, in another world, I could have gotten really invested in. It feels very much related to writing; there's something restorative about being able to see something as a whole. When you're inside of a house, you can only ever see parts of it. With a miniature house, you can see it whole from all angles. I think this is kind of like writing, trying to understand a character, their story, and see it from all angles.

What literary magazine would you recommend to your students?

I think I’ll bypass naming any individual magazine and instead direct students to Wigleaf’s Top 50. Annually, they round up the best flash fictions from the year, and a guest editor selects the Top 50. The archives name and link to all those stories from all over the internet, so it’s a great place to discover journals that are actively publishing shorter pieces. I think students often end up writing or starting short pieces in classes, mostly as a result of in-class exercises, so it’s nice to think that some of those could be developed and sent out. The Wigleaf Top 50 keeps a finger on the pulse of who's publishing now, all the way from established journals, like Cincinnati Review and Gulf Coast, etc., to brand new online journals. There's a nice range.

Do you have a writing tip for emerging writers?

Don't be elitist. You should aim for top tier magazines, but don’t discount the little brand new online journals that got started three months ago by two undergraduates trying to put something cool into the world. Just support other people trying to do this thing we’re all trying to do, to keep writing and publishing alive.