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Please join us for a reading with Molly McCloy (Nonfiction, 2006) as she sits down with Luis Jaramillo, Associate Professor of Writing and Chair of Fiction, to discuss her memoir Nine Grudges: The Spiteful Origins of the Happiest Dyke on Earth.
About the Book:
"On the cusp of her 1993 college graduation in Olympia, Molly McCloy spends her time drunk and high, pulling dykey pranks, and thrashing in mosh pits—anything to avoid the troubled, working-class family she left behind in Arizona. But after a vivid nightmare involving her dad, Molly writes him a letter, asking him to apologize for nine instances of mental, verbal, and physical abuse. She revisits each of these nine grudges before working up enough courage to mail the letter. Then, to her surprise, her dad writes back.
"Nine Grudges grabs hold of you like a best friend ready to divulge terrible, wonderful secrets. Funny, soulful, absolutely unafraid to look life in the eye, Molly McCloy’s tough and tender voice is addictive. An electric debut!"
—Michelle Tea, author of Knocking Myself Up
"Nine Grudges shouldn’t be funny, but it is simultaneously hilarious and chilling. Like Dorothy Allison in Bastard Out of Carolina, McCloy has a powerful voice, a poet’s ear, and amazing recall".
—Ann Cummins, Red Ant House and Yellowcake
Presented by the Creative Writing Program at The New School for Social Research.
The New School offered the first academic creative writing workshop in 1931 and pioneered a new philosophy of education. The idea: students would make their own lives and their own stories part of their education. Today, The New School continues to celebrate and cultivate daring and diverse new voices through its Creative Writing program. The value of this approach is reflected in the publications and achievements of our MFA Creative Writing graduates and faculty.
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Molly McCloy is a four-time Moth StorySLAM winner whose memoir Nine Grudges: The Spiteful Origins of the Happiest Dyke on Earth won the 2023 Quill Prose Award from Red Hen Press who will publish the book in 2026. She also won the 2023 Book Pipeline “Unpublished” Award for the same manuscript. Molly’s storytelling work was profiled in O Magazine in Feb. 2018. She holds an M.F.A. in Nonfiction from The New School, and she has facilitated storytelling workshops for Pima Community College, Quest Storytelling, the University of Arizona’s The Agnese Nelms Haury Program in Environmental and Social Justice, and Auto Entry and CPA Academy. She has performed stories for Bawdy and RADAR in San Francisco, and at Dixon Place in New York City, The Scottsdale Center for the Arts, and The Arizona Biltmore. Her stories have been broadcast on KJZZ in Phoenix and KUAZ and KXCI in Tucson, and she’s performed comedy sets at Laff’s, The Bro Show, and the Tucson Improv Movement. Since 2009, she has been teaching college students to embrace courage and authenticity in their writing.
