Indies Introduce Q&A with Molly Olguín

Molly Olguín is the author of The Sea Gives Up the Dead, a Winter/Spring 2025 Indies Introduce adult selection, and the May 2025 Indie Next List pick. 

Randy Schiller of Left Bank Books in St. Louis, Missouri, served on the bookseller panel that selected Olguín’s debut for Indies Introduce.

He said of the book, “There is no getting away from death here. However, there’s a subtlety that resonates throughout the wonderfully smooth and lithe prose that makes these tales a joy to read. Absolutely fantastic!”

Randy Schiller: Hello everybody. My name is Randy Schiller. I'm a buyer from Left Bank Books in St Louis, and today I'm here with Molly Olguín, who's a queer writer, educator, and monster aficionado. Her stories have appeared in magazines like Quarterly West and The Normal School. She was the recipient of the 2023 Grace Paley Prize, as well as the Loft Mentor Series Fellowship in 2019. With Jackie Hedeman, she is the creator of the audio drama The Pasithea Powder. She teaches English and creative writing to high school students in Seattle, Washington. The Sea Gives Up the Dead, which we're here to discuss today, is her debut collection of short stories. It goes on sale April 29. Welcome, Molly.

Molly Olguín: Thank you so much for having me, Randy. I'm so excited to be here!

RS: I have a question that is the obvious question that I did not want to ask. However, when I was doing some research, I thought it would be an interesting question for everyone. When did you know you wanted to write, and what was your process when you started?

MO: I love this question. When I was in preschool, I remember they asked all the little kids, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” And my answer in preschool was, “I want to be a writer. But I know I can't just be a writer, so I'll be a ballerina or a famous actress or something to pay the bills.” So I really always wanted to be a writer.

I was writing stuff as a child, I was writing stuff as a teen, I was playing around with a lot of genres. In undergrad and as a high school student, I spent a lot of time writing plays. So now, as a high school creative writing teacher, I really recommend my students play around in different genres. I loved plays because I feel like they were really good at teaching me dialogue and giving me that sense of narrative arc that I use now in prose and in fiction.

RS: Oh, that's great. What about screenplays? Do you also write screenplays?

MO: I do also write screenplays, yes! My writing partner, Jackie Hedeman, and I have a screenplay about Oscar Wilde's horrible, evil, twink boyfriend, Bosie Douglas, in his old age.

RS: That's awesome.

MO: It’s really fun, getting to play around with how you tell a story just with voice and action, without that sense of interiority.

RS: Everyone agreed The Sea Gives Up the Dead is a wonderful book. I absolutely love it. The prose is beautiful. It's very obvious that you've been writing for a long time (i.e., that you started as a preschooler knowing you wanted to write).

It sounds kind of oxymoronic to say that it was a joy to read, because death is such a theme throughout the book. We wanted to let everyone know that, yes, it's about death, but it's not going to drag you down. I'm wondering why death is something you wanted to explore?

MO: First of all, thank you so much. That is so delightful. I'm so happy.

I was thinking about this question, and I have the glib answer, which is: there's the cliché about the only two constants in life, and death is more interesting than taxes.

I'm also interested in death because it’s just the biggest possible change. Death is this essential change that's going to impact your life in a thousand ways.

In “Seven Deaths” I play around with what a death is. There's literal death, but there's also different kinds of loss that transform your sense of self, your relationships, and how you're going to live your life. I think transformation is really fascinating and fun to write about.

RS: I would totally agree. And, as I start the latter half of my life, death is something I'm finding interesting to contemplate, too.

MO: Yeah, it’s constant.

RS: This is more of a question about your job as a writing teacher, but also in reference to the book — specifically “The Princess Wants for Company” and “The Sea Gives Up the Dead” — could you talk about setting and how important that is, and how you decided on the setting for both of those?

MO: It's funny you mention those two stories because “The Sea Gives Up the Dead” is one of the only stories in the book not set in Los Angeles. Almost all the stories are set in San Pedro, which is the neighborhood where I grew up.

One thing that was really fun to me, when thinking about the setting was, “How do I keep the place mostly the same, but have different genres and different historical periods? How do you look at one thing, but through all these different lenses?”

With other stories in the book, I'm thinking, “This is science fiction, historical fiction, two sides of the same coin. We're just looking at the present, we're looking at one place.”

But for “The Princess Wants for Company,” I was interested in 1950s lesbian pulp novels — those ones with the blonde who's swooning dramatically on the cover, and the brunette in the turtleneck who looks kind of evil. I really just wanted to play with that pulp novel kind of cover image, but deconstruct the power dynamics of that. For “The Sea Gives Up the Dead,” the setting really gave me the plot. I couldn't set it any other time, because I really wanted to write about the mother going on the Gold Star voyage after World War I. World War I presents the problem that makes Selma have to face all these things that she's been avoiding about her relationship with her child. You can't take that out of that setting and still have the same story.

RS: “The Princess Wants for Company” totally came across as the Golden Age of Hollywood. You cover several different themes, but they all work together: the Latina experience, the desire and infatuation, as well the entitlement of this family. Are those just a product of the story itself? Or were those things you wanted to talk about?

MO: I always write from a sense of “what's the most interesting choice for the story?” And all the things you mentioned are things I'm really interested in talking about. With this book, a lot of the stories have these little seeds germinating from family stories. A lot of these stories begin as little family fairy tales that then become these broader, queer fairy tales.

“The Princess Wants for Company” is the one that is least grounded in a specific story from my family, but it is really grounded in two experiences from my youth. As a child, I lived in San Pedro, and I remember driving from San Pedro into Rancho Palos Verdes. San Pedro’s a very working class town. Rancho Palos Verdes is rolling hills, and everything's green, and there's horses on a white picket fence path. It felt very different from the glisten of the concrete ground that I just was driving past. Entering into a new class space was something I was really interested in.

And the baby is also drawn from life. I was a camp counselor as a teenager. Because I was tall and looked responsible, they put me in charge of the babies, even though I was not qualified to do so. I remember this feeling of deep frustration and fear. I was trying to treat every baby as a little individual person and I realized, “Oh, it's possible to have a personality clash with a baby.” Because they’re a person the same way that an adult is a person.

And then, I think the investigation of queer desires and the Latina identity is just me trying to write about people like myself and my family.

RS: I love that story. I reread it over the weekend. Another thing I feel — and “The Sea Gives Up the Dead,” is the best example for me — is the power that a reader is able to learn empathy through reading. And is that something you think about as a writer when you're working?

MO: I don't think very much about the reader's sense of empathy while writing. I try not to think about the reader at all while writing, because if I did, I would be way too terrified to write anything down.

But I do think about empathy while writing, because it's my job as a writer to have empathy for all the characters — even the ones who behave really, really badly. So, in these stories, I have a lot of characters who I have fundamental sympathy for, even though they're sort of villains. The parents in “The Sea Gives Up the Dead” behave pretty badly, and Roque in “Seven Deaths” is also a pretty bad dad. But I'm rendering them in such a way that you can have sympathy for them.

RS: So, “The Undertaker's Dogs.” I think about Isabel a lot. Having to deal with the death of puppies, I could see that being a struggle. As a reader, I felt a lot of empathy for her having to go through that experience.

MO: I love that so much. She's trying her best. It's not always great, but she's trying her best.

RS: I'm sticking with “The Sea Gives Up the Dead” because it's such a great story. It's obviously Selma’s story, but after I finished it, I kind of played it in reverse in my head and realized that it felt like you're getting Eddie's perspective too. And I'm just wondering if you've got more, if Eddie is a character you want to write more about, or you have written more about?

MO: I love this question so much because it's a writing prompt. Now I get to take it away and consider it. So genuinely, thank you for that.

I had always thought of the story as being Selma’s story. This is one of the stories that is very firmly grounded in my family. My great grandmother did one of those Gold Star voyages. I asked family members about it, and found a letter that my great grandfather wrote to his other son saying, “Hey, your brother died of the flu, and by the way, you should come home for Thanksgiving.” The letter that appears in the story is the exact, verbatim letter that I found.

I find that letter very heartbreaking, but what made me curious wasn't the grandfather, but the mother — the person who is absent from that expression of grief, but who then gets to go on this journey to try and find her child who's gone. That was the seed of the story for me, trying to imagine this woman's experience. The rest of it, obviously, is made up.

I think Eddie's story is really interesting to imagine, just from her perspective. She is still undergoing this tremendous transformation, in that Eddie gets to decide what she's willing to sacrifice in order to be herself. And the answer is everything — all of her relationships, all of her resources, her entire life. That is a really brave thing to do, and I am curious about her now that you mention it.

RS: The woman Selma speaks with on the ship: is that Death? I thought it might be at first. But then, obviously, that's not where it leads.

MO: Oh! I love the idea that she's Death.

It is ambiguous in the story. I think it's up to interpretation. I will tell you my answer. But this is my answer, it doesn't have to be your answer.

To me, she is the Virgin Mary.

I try to put a lot of references to Guadalupe in there. The ship that she sails on is the Guadalupe. And to me, the image of the blue shawl with the halo of sun behind her is very like Guadalupe.

I read this amazing book in grad school, Madonnas That Maim, and it was about the Virgin Mary appearing to yell at you. There are these stories where the Virgin Mary appears, and then she will break your legs and say, “You all are full of sin. Build me a chapel.” Or she'll appear and be like, “I have sent a plague. Build me a chapel and also repent of your sins.”

I love this idea of a Virgin Mary who appears in this cruel way, almost, and forces you to become a better person, make a better choice, or at least gives you the choice to do those things.

RS: Again, I love the book. I think we all did. Is there anything else you want to share or add?

MO: No, thank you so much. I'm so excited that you like the book. I'm excited for people to read it.

RS: I think people are going to love it.

MO: Thanks!

Find out more about the author at mollyolguin.com

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