“It didn’t really occur to me that I could write fiction until my late 20s. And somebody just said, ‘well, you read all the time, why don’t you try writing?’ It was a shock,” novelist and Upper School English Teacher Ginger Moran said.
Moran has loved literature ever since she was a child growing up in Charlottesville, Virginia, where her mother would read her Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales that were “dark and wonderful.”
Moran, who speaks about reading passionately, “didn’t know what [her mother] was thinking” when she read her those stories. Nevertheless, she fell in love with reading. Throughout her life, she has “found so much inspiration and consolation in literature.”
Although Moran was born in Charlottesville, she has lived in many places throughout her life. She went to school in Houston, and her kids were born in Mobile, Alabama. She also lived in Nashville and Switzerland. Her favorite place to live was the Gulf Coast because of its “very unusual culture” and “real French flavor.”
Moran taught creative writing classes at a number of universities. As a novelist, she sought to help people embark on the writing journey. From there, her career evolved to working as a book mentor, advising aspiring authors as they wrote their books. She said book mentorship was “like being a midwife” because, through the process of helping people envision their books, she helped them “really get clear about it” and “birth this beautiful thing.”
Moran first came to Sidwell during the 2022-2023 school year. After the teacher in Moran’s current position took a leave of absence, Moran substituted for what she expected would be a few weeks but what soon turned into a year. Moran was then hired by Sidwell; she taught two English 10 sections during the 2023-2024 school year and, after a hiatus, returned to teaching English 10 part-time this year.
Moran said she “fell into” her work at Sidwell and “love[s] being here.” She also thinks that Sidwell has a “really nice community.” As Moran was raised Quaker — her father was a conscientious objector during World War II — she found it “very easy to jump into this culture” and feel a sense of community at Sidwell.
Moran has written three novels and is working on her fourth. There are also “at least two more books in [her] head.” Her novel in progress, an environmental thriller titled “How Death Comes Between Us,” follows an environmentalist graphic designer hired by an oil company whose work contradicts her values.
When asked about her struggles with writing, Moran, who has published three novels, paraphrased the saying, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” Moran believes that the process of writing is both “hard and deeply rewarding.” She “love[s] a long sentence, a long, complicated sentence. So I just am, I think, naturally a novelist.” Moran said that it takes her “forever” to write a novel. She writes two pages a day, which “accumulates if you’re consistent.”
Offering advice to young writers, Moran said, “don’t let anything stand in your way” or “let the critic come in.” Referencing the Geoffrey Chaucer quotation, “the lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne,” she noted the importance of not being a perfectionist. Finally, she recommended that writers just “get up and write your pages…just for the joy of it.”
“It’s really a lifetime of learning the craft,” Moran said of the challenge writers face. “And it’s never perfect. There’s always a better version of it. So just go ahead and get started.”
