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Goldie Goldbloom is an Australian novelist and short story writer. Her novel The Paperbark Shoe won the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Fiction and the Foreword Magazine Novel of the Year. She's been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Dora Maar House-Brown Foundation Fellowship.
She teaches creative writing at the University of Chicago and is the mother of eight children. Goldie raises chickens, trout and organic vegetables at her urban garden.
Goldie Goldbloom's website
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You chose to set the book in your native Australia. Do you believe it would have been as effective if the setting had been, say, the 1930s Dust Bowl in the United States, or was the Australian setting essential?
I'm always excited when someone asks me a question that I haven't been asked before, especially one that makes me think deeply. I am imagining right now, what my novel might have been like set in the US during the 1930s dustbowl. And what I have (ha!) is a failure of imagination. I don't know enough about rural America to write well about it. The red dirt of Australia is still underneath my fingernails. But perhaps you were really asking if someone else, someone American had written this book, could it have been set in the dustbowl? Hmmm. Good question! I once saw a version of Othello set in Manhattan, in modern language, and it was translatable. Themes of isolation and xenophobia and heartbreak and loss are universal, but in a squeaky little corner of my soul I still want to believe that The Paperbark Shoe had to be set in Western Australia, in Wyalkatchem, in 1943.
How long did it take you to write the book? How many drafts did you go through in the process of polishing it?
I read that James ...
Jim Crace is the author of many novels including Continent, The Gift of Stones, Arcadia, Signals of Distress, Quarantine (1998 Whitbread Novel of the Year; shortlisted for the Booker Prize), Being Dead (2001 National Book ... (more)
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