Queering classics out of cliché with Seattle author Molly Olguín

April 27, 2026 / 8:02 am

caption: The KUOW Book Club is reading "The Sea Gives Up the Dead" by Molly Olguín in April 2026. Olguín will join KUOW's Katie Campbell for a live discussion at the Seattle Central Library on April 23, 2026.

The KUOW Book Club read "The Sea Gives Up the Dead" by Molly Olguín in April. Olguín joined KUOW's Katie Campbell live at Seattle Central Library last week to talk about folklore, fairytales, and the power of queering classic stories.

This was the third of four live author conversations KUOW is hosting in partnership with the Seattle Public Library. Listen to the conversation below or find it in the "Meet Me Here" feed on the KUOW app or wherever you get your podcasts.

o not misunderstand this headline to mean anything in Molly Olguín's collection is cliché. Rather, see her as the heroine who rescues classic concepts from the depths of overuse and gives them new life.

The magic isn't just in how she has revamped standard stories, like the princess rescued from the dragon by a nanny rather than a knight, but that she adds an extra unique twist, like the dragon being the top story on cable news. Delightful.

And the thing I learned while talking to Olguín at the Seattle Central Library last week was that she didn't even necessarily set out to be this subversive force.

"I don't even think it was like a very conscious decision," she told me. "I am a queer person, and I'm part of a queer community, and that is going to happen in my fiction no matter what."

That nanny who falls in love with the mother of the child she cares for came not from a desire to subvert hetero-normative romance but rather from an interest in the nanny's perspective. It was more about exploring a desire to be part of a world you're excluded from.

"In the classroom, we have like this concept of windows and mirrors, right?" said Olguín, who's also an English and creative writing teacher. "The idea is every child should be able to see themselves reflected in a mirror. ... You read a story that has a perspective like yours, you understand yourself in conversation with people across time. But you also really need windows, otherwise you're just sort of being a narcissist, looking at yourself all the time.

"So, you need need queer writers, you need all kinds of writers because you need to be able to recognize yourself and you need to be able to recognize and love other people."

Olguín gives the reader both mirrors and windows in this collection.

Running through much of it like a current is her exploration of change. Change is a driving force in the book, and that was reflected in our conversation.

"Life has change. When it's over, you don't have anything else to do, like, there's nothing to process," she said.

So, her characters do a lot of processing.

In "Clara Aguilera's Holy Lungs," elder sister Natalie has to process not only the death of her younger sister Clara but also Clara's sudden sainthood when her body does not rot. To Natalie, she's just a normal child who was killed in a freak accident.

Clara died, as all the others did, at God's hand. He sent an asteroid hurtling toward the world, and the world sent bombs to shoot it out of the sky, narrowly averting an age of ash and death. But of course, God had the last word. A little fragment of alien rock dropped into the Pacific, twenty miles from Catalina Island, cracking open the ocean floor. A great wave stretched up over the coast, bathing the port of Los Angeles in an eerie green light before it came crashing down. It swallowed up the shantytown at E street, the Bradbury Building, the fiberglass whales of the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium, the pink castle in Orange County and the ancient wood of Olvera Street with equanimity. Only two things truly left Los Angeles whole, and those were Clara Aguilera's holy body and Clara Aguilera's holy lungs. When Clara was alive, she was no one in particular: a freshman at Pedro High, chubby with baby fat and oily with puberty. In death, she became a sensation. THE SEA GIVES UP THE DEAD (CLARA AGUILERA'S HOLY LUNGS), PAGE 73

Over the course of the story, the change that Natalie has to process is both the change in the way the world sees her sister — from "freshman at Pedro High" to "La Incorruptible" — and the change in Natalie's life — from one with a sister to one without.

Try as she might, Natalie cannot see her sister's body as saintly.

Natalie drew in trembling breath after trembling breath and tried vainly to transmute her horror into faith. THE SEA GIVES UP THE DEAD (CLARA AGUILERA'S HOLY LUNGS), PAGE 81

I asked Olguín whether that line represented what she was trying to do with the entire collection, to transmute the reader's horror into faith. But faith in what?

"In experiencing horror, there's the possibility of comfort maybe," she said. "Not hope exactly but some kind of reassurance about the natural order of things. And I think I find that both very tantalizing and sort of impossible. It's in the trembling breath, not actually in the reaching it."

There is grief and this effort to reach comfort on the other side throughout the collection.

In the titular story, "The Sea Gives Up the Dead," the mother of a dead solider has her faith restored when she boards a ship to France to visit her child's grave — only to find her child, Eddie, is not dead but rather changed.

But this is no ghost story.

"The child she finds turns out to be her daughter, Eddie," Olguín explained. "Eddie has transitioned."

It's a wallop of a discovery for the grieving mother, Selma, as it would be for anyone. But it's especially earthshaking to Selma, because she'd rejected her child after finding a teenage Eddie wearing her whalebone corset and after her husband found Eddie with a boy. Eddie became a soldier after that.

Suddenly, Selma has a second chance that any of the other mothers she'd come to France with would've given anything for, and she's not sure she deserves it.

Eddie was alive, a lightning strike, electric and rare and unasked for, undreamt of. Every pilgrim on the Guadalupe wanted her son back, and there were a dozen steamer ships traveling from all over the States with pilgrims aboard, all with the same prayer. And that was not counting the French mothers, the German mothers, the mothers all over the world who never wanted their sons to die, a worldful of mothers who must have all done right by their children, and surely all of them deserved it more than Selma. Somewhere, the mother of the child lying in Eddie's grave, wearing Eddie's dog tags, deserved to see her son again. Relief yawned open in her undeserving life like a tragedy-because if Eddie was alive, then Eddie had not wanted to come home; Eddie had chosen to slip her life around a dead boy's throat and leave her mother alone. The sea would give up no more dead; this was their very last chance. "Thank God," Selma said, and held her child tight. THE SEA GIVES UP THE DEAD (THE SEA GIVES UP THE DEAD), PAGE 131

"Eddie is the person whose choices actually matter here," Olguín said. "And Selma's change is about accepting someone else's change."

Change will continue to be a theme as we close out this winter's cohort of books. Our next read features a woman going through a changing of life's seasons as we, too, transition into spring.

On May 21, I'll be concluding our live speaker series with Sonora Jha and her latest novel, "Intemperance," in which a middle-aged woman starts a firestorm when she holds a contest, based on an ancient Indian ritual, in which men must compete to win her affections.

RSVP HERE.

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Katie Campbell
Online Editor/Reporter

Katie joined KUOW's online team as an editor and reporter in 2024, after serving three years as senior producer of the local Morning Edition program. She has covered a variety of local topics, including the Seattle City Council, elections, and breaking news. She also brings readers some levity with a weekly news quiz.
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