People are going to bash you. You get rejected. It's hard. I don't really feel like that's my place as the teacher. I think the most important thing is to figure out what they're trying to do and turn them onto writers who are doing similar stuff. I think that's something I can do more than anything else: get them to be big readers.
Molly AntopolWith the Israel stories, it was for me the most surprising way the title would fit in. I kept thinking about, for a lot of my Israeli characters, what it was like to inherit such a complicated and symbiotic relationship to America and to feel how tangled that is, and it's nothing that they chose to do themselves.
Molly AntopolI'm not Israeli and because I'm not a citizen, it doesn't matter how often I go there - I'm still not Israeli. There's this way I feel so close to so many people there, but I always feel like I'm staring through the glass. And in a way, having this really thin piece of glass between me and this place is incredibly useful for me as a writer, because I'm just so hyper-aware of it. I could take a walk in San Francisco and probably notice a third of the things that I would notice in Israel, because I'm just attuned to everything when I'm there.
Molly AntopolIt was this feeling for a lot of my characters, who are dissidents or banned artists and writers, that they had had to fight living under so much surveillance, and then suddenly they come to America and they're like, I'm not being surveilled - I'm not even being noticed at all.
Molly AntopolSo it was doing all this research or going to the archives or doing all these interviews or traveling, and then trying as much as I can to delete all of that research in a later draft so that all the reader cares about is the characters.
Molly Antopol