Featured on January 19, 2002

Writing these intros once a month is often an interesting little excursion into our guest writer's lives and careers. Most of them provide more information than I can use. After all, they're writers.

What's available about Molly Best Tinsley is just the facts, Ma'am. She taught at the Naval Academy for twenty years and is the first professor emerita in its history. She resides in Ashland, Oregon, where she writes and teaches a workshop called "Writing from Life" for the Southern Oregon University Extended Campus Program. She also writes a column on theatre for the Jefferson Public Radio monthly magazine.

Molly won the 1999 Sandstone Prize in Short Fiction for her short story collection Throwing Knives, which was published in April 2000 by Ohio State University Press, and subsequently won the 2001 Oregon Book Award for Short Fiction. She has written plays, a book called The Creative Process published by St Martin's Press in 1993 and a novel, My Life with Darwin, published By Houghton Mifflin in 1991.

She is a Bread Loaf Scholar, a two-time National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Maryland Arts Council grant recipient as well as recipient of the Civilian Teaching Award by the U. S. Naval Academy.

Anything else you want to know about Professor Tinsley will have to come from reading her work. I've formed an opinion or two, but I'll keep them to myself. The stories in Throwing Knives are slice-of-life, extended vignettes with abrupt, ambiguous endings. The main characters are female, of various ages, intelligent and troubled, with a common strata of quirkiness running through their introspective personalities. They all seem to be just on the point of abandoning convention, all about to take a huge, spiritual breath in preparation for taking a generous stab at life outside the box of their lives and relationships. It works for me...