She got her start writing film reviews for a community paper. At the time she was a newly divorced mother of two, with a Master's degree in English Literature, and waited tables on the California coast. Her first assignment, a review of “Schindler’s List”, took her six days to write. “Now it would take me 45 minutes,” she says.
Giles believes that craft can be taught. As editor of the alternative weekly, the North Bay Bohemian, she trains her interns and staff how to write “and pays them poorly as they learn.”
During a recent 2-hour workshop through the Writers Forum of Petaluma, she explored questions that haunt emerging writers. Full of witticisms, Giles shared tricks of the trade such as how one keeps a sense of beauty in prose “without going over the flowery edge into a bowl of potpourri.”
