Cereal boxes and sympathy

Interview with Goldie Goldbloom, by Marianne Kunkel.

Goldie Goldbloom's short fiction has appeared in StoryQuarterly, Narrative Magazine, and the anthology, Keep Your Wives Away from Them: Orthodox Women, Unorthodox Desires. Her novel Toads' Museum of Freaks and Wonders won the 2008 AWP Novel Award and is in its second printing in Australia (as The Paperbark Shoe). She has a story in a forthcoming anthology of emerging Australian writers. She also won the Jerusalem Post International Fiction Prize. Goldbloom lives with her eight children in Chicago.

 MK: In your story “The Telephone of the Dead” (Prairie Schooner, Fall 2010), a wife and dead husband negotiate the power dynamics of their marriage even from, in the husband’s case, the grave. As you wrote the story, did you aim for readers’ sympathies to lie with one spouse over the other, or was your intention to portray both parties, as is often the case, as equally flawed?

GG: Wait. Don't dead guys automatically get everyone's sympathy? I'm going to have to go back to the drawing board on this one...

Initially, I wanted both parties to be fairly equally flawed, a crankily married couple familiar to most of us, but then I began to play with the ways memory is distorted over time, especially under pressure, and I was intrigued by the ways in which the wife comes to really hate the husband and only remember bad things about him, and the way the husband loses touch with the reality of his family. I don't pay a lot of attention to where a reader's sympathies might lie because I just want to write it the juicy way it happens.

Hey, do you think if I pay attention to where a reader's sympathies might lie, I could sell more of my stories?

My favorite line in “The Telephone of the Dead” is, “He hadn’t graduated from magical thinking,” which refers to the main character’s husband’s mentality that their house cleaned itself and that his ironed shirts “arrived from the Garden of Eden.” In the case of clever one-liners such as this one, do you brainstorm them separately and eventually find homes for them in particular stories, or do specific stories call for their unique creation? 

There's something about writing a fresh story, especially one with a slightly skewed perspective, that has me laughing my head off as I write and those kind of one-liners bubble up all by themselves. They are indigenous to the story and the mood I am in when I am writing it.

Of course, I have a pretty weird sense of humor, and what makes me laugh often doesn't make other folks laugh. That might be because I don't watch TV and all my life, I've had a lot of space to amuse myself. I find myself very amusing, but I am told I am really very boring and incredibly sad at telling jokes. You might as well have a bloodhound on illegal pharmaceuticals do the telling.

It is no surprise that, as a mother to eight children, your descriptions of the children, Polly and Ronnie, in “The Telephone of the Dead” are dead-on; for example, when you describe “a ring of mustard yellow baby poo on the leg of [Polly’s] onesie.” Slightly surprising, however, is that school-age Ronnie does not have any speaking lines—why?

One of my concerns with writing this story was accurately giving a sense of a person moving through the stages of grief, because even though "The Telephone of the Dead" is funny in a way that makes me laugh (there's a warning in that), it's also serious. It's a story, after all, about one woman's life after her husband dies suddenly.

After my own mother died, I had the odd sense that no one spoke for many weeks. Obviously, they did speak, but I was so absorbed in my own experience of grief that I did not notice what they were saying. Ronnie speaks to his mother, but, from her perspective, nothing is said. He takes care of himself and is not asking anything from her, so she can let him fall off the map...an uncomfortable mirror of her husband's eroding memory of the world and his family.

You have served in a number of roles in your lifetime—schoolteacher, librarian, cook, midwife. When did you find extra time to read, and what was the book that started you down the writing path?

I think that most writers are also obsessed readers (think reading by moonlight). It's part of the job description. All those kids from elementary school who used to read the backs of the cereal box and the instructions on the toilet paper and the warnings on the toaster ovens, they all grew up to be writers. Like most other writers, I can't remember a time when I didn't know how to read, but choosing a favorite book is a wee bit like choosing a favorite child. Even if you have one, it's unkind and impolitic to say.

And truthfully, it was my grandmother who started me on the writing path. She wrote me a letter a week for over twenty years, and I wrote back. She encouraged me to be her "eyes in other places" and she asked me leading questions about what I had seen. Saying I'd seen a cat on the roof was not enough. Oh god, how I loved her. When she died, the telephone exchange operator came and regaled us with stories about how Gran used to call her up to chat in the middle of the night. And tell her the most outrageous lies, I mean, stories.

You are a successful writer of both fiction and non-fiction. Do you have a preference for one form over the other? Is it easy to decide which project goes into which form?

I love writing fiction. It makes me happy in my bones to take stuff that everyone knows and twist it and mess it up and turn it every which way until it's something really unfamiliar with bits of familiar sticking out everywhere. Non-fiction can be fun if you don't have to write the truth all the time.

Interview with Goldie Goldbloom, by Marianne Kunkle.

 

Goldie Goldbloom's short fiction has appeared in StoryQuarterly, Narrative Magazine, and the anthology, Keep Your Wives Away from Them: Orthodox Women, Unorthodox Desires. Her novel Toads' Museum of Freaks and Wonders won the 2008 AWP Novel Award and is in its second printing in Australia (as The Paperbark Shoe). She has a story in a forthcoming anthology of emerging Australian writers. She also won the Jerusalem Post International Fiction Prize. Goldbloom lives with her eight children in Chicago.

 

MK: In your story “The Telephone of the Dead” (Prairie Schooner, Fall 2010), a wife and dead husband negotiate the power dynamics of their marriage even from, in the husband’s case, the grave. As you wrote the story, did you aim for readers’ sympathies to lie with one spouse over the other, or was your intention to portray both parties, as is often the case, as equally flawed?

 

GG: Wait. Don't dead guys automatically get everyone's sympathy? I'm going to have to go back to the drawing board on this one...

 

Initially, I wanted both parties to be fairly equally flawed, a crankily married couple familiar to most of us, but then I began to play with the ways memory is distorted over time, especially under pressure, and I was intrigued by the ways in which the wife comes to really hate the husband and only remember bad things about him, and the way the husband loses touch with the reality of his family. I don't pay a lot of attention to where a reader's sympathies might lie because I just want to write it the juicy way it happens.

Hey, do you think if I pay attention to where a reader's sympathies might lie, I could sell more of my stories?

 

My favorite line in “The Telephone of the Dead” is, “He hadn’t graduated from magical thinking,” which refers to the main character’s husband’s mentality that their house cleaned itself and that his ironed shirts “arrived from the Garden of Eden.” In the case of clever one-liners such as this one, do you brainstorm them separately and eventually find homes for them in particular stories, or do specific stories call for their unique creation? 

 

There's something about writing a fresh story, especially one with a slightly skewed perspective, that has me laughing my head off as I write and those kind of one-liners bubble up all by themselves. They are indigenous to the story and the mood I am in when I am writing it.

 

Of course, I have a pretty weird sense of humor, and what makes me laugh often doesn't make other folks laugh. That might be because I don't watch TV and all my life, I've had a lot of space to amuse myself. I find myself very amusing, but I am told I am really very boring and incredibly sad at telling jokes. You might as well have a bloodhound on illegal pharmaceuticals do the telling.

 

It is no surprise that, as a mother to eight children, your descriptions of the children, Polly and Ronnie, in “The Telephone of the Dead” are dead-on; for example, when you describe “a ring of mustard yellow baby poo on the leg of [Polly’s] onesie.” Slightly surprising, however, is that school-age Ronnie does not have any speaking lines—why?

 

One of my concerns with writing this story was accurately giving a sense of a person moving through the stages of grief, because even though "The Telephone of the Dead" is funny in a way that makes me laugh (there's a warning in that), it's also serious. It's a story, after all, about one woman's life after her husband dies suddenly.

 

After my own mother died, I had the odd sense that no one spoke for many weeks. Obviously, they did speak, but I was so absorbed in my own experience of grief that I did not notice what they were saying. Ronnie speaks to his mother, but, from her perspective, nothing is said. He takes care of himself and is not asking anything from her, so she can let him fall off the map...an uncomfortable mirror of her husband's eroding memory of the world and his family.

 

You have served in a number of roles in your lifetime—schoolteacher, librarian, cook, midwife. When did you find extra time to read, and what was the book that started you down the writing path?

 

I think that most writers are also obsessed readers (think reading by moonlight). It's part of the job description. All those kids from elementary school who used to read the backs of the cereal box and the instructions on the toilet paper and the warnings on the toaster ovens, they all grew up to be writers. Like most other writers, I can't remember a time when I didn't know how to read, but choosing a favorite book is a wee bit like choosing a favorite child. Even if you have one, it's unkind and impolitic to say.

 

And truthfully, it was my grandmother who started me on the writing path. She wrote me a letter a week for over twenty years, and I wrote back. She encouraged me to be her "eyes in other places" and she asked me leading questions about what I had seen. Saying I'd seen a cat on the roof was not enough. Oh god, how I loved her. When she died, the telephone exchange operator came and regaled us with stories about how Gran used to call her up to chat in the middle of the night. And tell her the most outrageous lies, I mean, stories.

 

You are a successful writer of both fiction and non-fiction. Do you have a preference for one form over the other? Is it easy to decide which project goes into which form?

 

I love writing fiction. It makes me happy in my bones to take stuff that everyone knows and twist it and mess it up and turn it every which way until it's something really unfamiliar with bits of familiar sticking out everywhere. Non-fiction can be fun if you don't have to write the truth all the time.