Myla Goldberg, author of the best-selling "The Bee Season," and "The False Friend," will be in the Twin Cities on Thursday. She'll speak at 7 p.m. at the Jewish Community Center, 1375 St. Paul Av., St. Paul. Admission is $6 for members, and $9 for the community at large.
We subjected the willing and amiable and slightly quirky (note author photo; we don't get many pictures of authors in trees) Goldberg to our standard ten questions. I don't know about you, but I want to know more about the small strange objects in her writing room's shadowbox. And I so love her final sentence.
1. Describe your writing room. I write in a small upstairs room in my house that has a window overlooking the backyard, with walls in two shades of yellow adorned with all sorts of stuff that makes me happy to look at -- art by friends; old posters; a shadowbox filled with strange small objects. 2. What is your writing strategy — do you have rituals that you maintain? I'm leery of rituals. Writing is a job like anything else. On a writing day, I sit down at my desk in the morning, take a small break for lunch, and then go back to my desk and stay there until the end of the day. 3. How do you get past writers' block (or the distraction of the Internet)? I make myself write even when I'm totally uninspired or I know what I'm writing is deeply terrible. Sometimes that means reading over work and editing to get myself back in the feel of something; sometimes it means giving myself a writing exercise to do, or forcing myself to write spontaneously and without stopping for a set period of time without thinking too much about what I'm actually writing. Not that any of that tends to make me feel better or feel like I'm having a good writing day, but sometimes the bad, uninspired writing of a particular day ends up sowing a seed for much better, inspired writing down the road. For me, Internet management is mostly about regulating when I check my e-mail, and limiting any research I might need to do to certain parts of certain days. 4. Do you have a favorite book from childhood? No. I have lots and lots of favorites. I will limit myself here to three, and to the elementary school portion of childhood: "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," by Roald Dahl; "Bridge to Terabithia," by Katherine Paterson; "The Cay," by Theodore Taylor...oh, wait, it's going to have to be four...and "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH," by Robert C. O'Brien. 5. What books do you re-read? When I was a kid, I re-read books all the time if I loved them. When I was a kid, I also thought I was immortal. Nowadays, I'm too aware of all the books I haven't read yet and the unavoidable fact that any book I re-read reduces by one the number of new books I'll get a crack at before my reading days are over. 6. What's on your desk? An oblong frame holding three photos of my daughters; a terrarium filled with dead moss; a postage scale; two small plaster reproductions of gargoyles; two small writing notebooks; an article entitled, "Presettlement and Present Forest Vegetation in Northen Vermont with Special References to Chittenden County"; a stapler; two boxes of paperclips; unopened mail; a marked-up print-out of a manuscript; two rubber stamps; one inkpad; a nail clipper; a pair of sunglasses, a tube of lip balm; a calculator; five ballpoint pens; three pencils, loose change; a thesaurus, a pad of yellow Post-It notes, a cracked coffee mug containing assorted pencils, markers, and a pair of scissors; an Edgar Allen Poe action figure; two memory sticks; a telephone; a computer monitor; a mouse with a Georges Perec mousepad; an empty coffee mug; a glass half-filled with seltzer; three flat, smooth rocks; a WWI-era inkwell in the shape of a German helmet; a small black carved skull from somewhere in Mexico; and a small, round, footed porcelain container from the Museum of Jurassic Technology containing rocks I collected from Whidbey Island. 7. Where are you right now? Describe what you see. I'm at my desk, which means you now know exactly what I'm seeing. 8. What are you reading right now? The words I'm typing to the answer of this question, but I bet that's not what you mean. I'm reading a book of three novellas by Steven Milhauser called Little Kingdoms. 9. What's been the best place so far to do a reading? I just did a reading in the Elizabethan Theater at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., which was one of the very prettiest spaces I've ever gotten to do anything in. 10. What authors have inspired you? Oh, gosh...Dr. Seuss; Roald Dahl; J.D. Salinger; Milan Kundera; Kurt Vonnegut; David Foster Wallace; Edith Wharton; Jeanette Winterson; Bruno Schulz; Milorad Pavic; George Perec; Ian McEwan; Kazuo Ishiguro; Graham Greene; Steven Milhauser; Vladimir Nabokov; Julio Cortazar; Jose Saramago...see, here's the thing: authors inspire me all the time. Whenever I read something good, it makes me want to sit down and write.
