Smith Creative Writers Reading Series: Molly McNett
On process, self-doubt, and taking the "long way"
Thursday, Oct. 15
Molly McNett's debut novel, Child of These Tears, was named in The New Statesman as one of the best books of 2025 by the critic Rowan Williams. She is the winner of the John Simmons Prize for the story collection One Dog Happy (Iowa UP), and her stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, and other journals. She teaches writing at Northern Illinois University and will read at Penn State Behrend as part of their Smith Creative Writers Reading Series on Thursday, Oct. 15.
McNett spoke with BFA Creative Writing student Gabby Rodriguez ahead of her appearance at Behrend about…
Gabby Rodriguez (GR): What were the sources of inspiration for your new novel, Child of These Tears?
Molly McNett (MM): I first read Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative in graduate school. The sound of it and the undercurrent (what is unspoken but felt in terms of sorrow, horror, etc.) stayed with me. After I started writing historical short fiction, I wanted to try one of my own and wrote Sarah's narrative. It was longer than a short story and more of an exercise in pastiche, I guess, so it sat around before I started adding other voices to it and it became a novel.
GR: What was your biggest challenge writing this book, and how did you overcome it?
MM: The whole thing was a challenge, and many days I wondered, "How exactly did I get myself into this?" There are many voices and points of view, and it was challenging trying to maintain a sound for the early eighteenth-century letters and narratives, and trying to figure out how to mix those with something a little more contemporary sounding for Constance, the child, without having it clash with the other voices, and trying to figure out how to weave everything together.
GR: What do you feel is most challenging about writing fiction in general?
MM: Self-doubt. That's what is going on for me now, and I see it in my students, too. We don't want to plunge in because what if we're foolish? Or we start something and think, "This is a great idea, but maybe for some other, smarter writer." What to do? Maybe read diaries of writers, who all seem to doubt themselves, at least from time to time. And we are all capable of bad work and good work, too. It shouldn't matter so much which it is – it's out of our hands in some way, but we need to have discipline and really work at it.
GR: How do you know when a story or a novel you're writing is finished?
MM: I sometimes feel it, or even know the end that I want from the start. Sometimes I don't know. With Child of These Tears, my editor told me it was missing a particular thing, and when he explained it, I immediately knew that he was right. It also made me feel scared that I could not come up with that thing, but I set to work on it and was able to come up with something that I now think is essential to the book. I still regret other things that I wasn't able to imagine more fully, though. The novel is done because it is out in print, and I don't want to revisit it … that's all.
GR: Can you describe your writing process? Do you follow an outline? Write multiple full drafts?
MM: It's a mess! I had multiple notebooks for this one: a handwritten commonplace book, the handwritten first draft of the captivity narrative, notes and little thoughts for the girl's voice in other different notebooks, and then I put everything together in one document and kept shifting things around, cutting and adding and starting over. There were eighty drafts, but that doesn't mean I started each one over from the beginning.
GR: What have you discovered (do you continue to discover) through your writing?
MM: I like historical fiction because I throw myself into an area that I know nothing about and maybe have no business writing about. I have to start earning the right to write about it somehow, and it is hard, and sometimes it feels like the "long way," but I really love the immersive feeling of it. I am always learning something, and it takes all of my energy, in a good way. Sometimes at the end of a good day I feel like I'm coming up out of the water. And then maybe over the years I have gained a little bit of trust in my own curiosity and the realization that the writing itself, that hard work and concentration, is going to be the best part of it. (I imagined something else when I started writing). This is something I can pass on to my students.
*Gabby Rodriguez, a student in the BFA in Creative Writing Program at Penn State Behrend, interviewed fiction writer Molly McNett in anticipation of her visit to Behrend as part of the Smith Creative Writers Reading Series. McNett will read from her work on Thursday, Oct. 15, at 6:00 p.m. in the Metzgar building. For more information visit: behrend.psu.edu/readings
