Goldie Goldbloom » Blog

Hello Stranger

goldie — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 06:45:00 +0000

I recently got an email from an editor I like, and he mentioned that he thought he had seen me in San Francisco. Sitting outside a health food grocery. In the sunshine. But he had walked past, not sure if it was me. We hadn’t seen each other for a while, you see. I thought he was in New Hampshire. He thought I was in Chicago. How odd it is, these coincidences. I was only there for a little while. Why does such a thing happen? Does it have meaning, or is it just one of the every day pleasures of being alive?

Book of the Year Finalist

goldie — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 06:38:37 +0000

Lovely news. I just heard that The Paperbark Shoe (aka: Toads’ Museum) is a finalist for ForeWord’s Book of the Year. Goodness, gracious, dearie, me! And that happened on the same day that my first copy of You Lose These and other stories arrived from Australia. You’d think the day would have been perfect already, but my young son, Yossel, came running in from school and he leapt into my arms and gave me a giant kiss, and then got busy tickling me until I absolutely howled with laughter. (He really knows how to get me going!) Yossel, by the way, is a fan of Tintin, and of Bones, and Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and of all other graphic type books. My mother used to say, it doesn’t matter what the child is reading, so long as they ARE reading. It could be the instruction manual to your 1975 Holden…it could be the bad poetry on the back of the toilet door down at the local pub (though one hopes the 8 year old isn’t down THERE)…it could be the ingredient list on that fluorescent cereal you bought by mistake last time you went to the supermarket, the one that makes your kids’ teeth glow in the dark after they’ve eaten it?…future book buyers, one and all! Anyway, I am glad that there is such a thing as Book of the Year, and it’s not something like Wordy App of the Year. Computers, I do not love you.

Novel Comes Out in Paperback: March 29th 2011

goldie — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 16:58:40 +0000

Picador has done a beautiful job and I’m excited to see the book! Many thanks, and especially to David Rogers.
http://us.macmillan.com/thepaperbarkshoe

A Wonderful Year

goldie — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 01:41:01 +0000

Today I drove with the windows unwound and chamber music blasting and the cool spring air running over my skin. I could hardly believe that a couple of weeks ago I was stuck in the disastrous Chicago blizzard, listening to my taxi driver (on Lakeshore Drive, no less) say: “It’s very serious. VERY serious!” This may or may not have been right after he told me that he was about to run out of gas. The big chunks of stuff flying overhead were not, after all, pieces of trees but chunks of ice being blown off Lake Michigan and that car whose windows got frozen open was full of snow. But today was beautiful. Peaceful. There was water on the ground and pigeons mating on the top of lamp posts.

‘Yesssss!’ I thought, high-fiving myself mentally. ‘I’m going to go for a walk in the Northpark Nature Center! Or hang out some laundry! Or at the very least, write a spring blog entry that mentions that it was warm today…’

exciting news

goldie — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 01:24:04 +0000

I recently was notified that I won the Great Lakes College Association’s New Writers’ Award for 2011. Very exciting news! Many thanks to the Association for that vote of confidence in Paperbark Shoe.

Italian POW hut

goldie — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 08:16:29 +0000

Some lovely people, Andrew and Amanda Stewart, in Lake Grace, Western Australia, sent me this photo of an Italian POW hut which is on their property. They said that it was of a very high standard for the time. It certainly looks better than my brother’s old outdoor laundry, which was built around the same time. The gorgeous women in the photo are (from l to r): Jo Hos, Sophie Hamdorf and Amanda Stewart.

goldie — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 08:10:31 +0000

Oh Sublime

goldie — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 07:57:40 +0000

Tonight, I went to hear the unstoppable Dorothy Alison speak at Calisthenics for Shrapnel, not knowing that I would hear a new poet, Tristan Silverman, who would completely take my breath away. It’s not often that I cry when I listen to someone speaking poetry out loud. The last time was over some Rilke that my friend Bruce recited for me, but that was, I think, about three years ago. I must have been saving the tears for tonight.

New Yorkly

goldie — Thu, 27 May 2010 17:59:58 +0000

In which timid Australian dweeby personage travels to New York City and meets scary Famous People, but also gets to eat yummy kosher foods in fancy kosher restaurants. And amazingly, that last is not an oxymoron but quite true. One may sit in comfort in aesthetic surroundings, with a cool Brooklyn breeze blowing through open doors, and eat something as spectacular as fetta-white asparagus pizza. One feels like a normal human being.

One also discovers what it is like to have a subway train scream past ones window every minute throughout the night, without curtains to screen one from the eyes of passersby.
One discovers that the large police presence in the nearby subway station is both necessary and helpful.
One discovers that smart and Famous People can be fun to hang out with.
One discovers that hundreds of folks might come out to support a LGBT reading in a Jewish space.
One discovers that one’s friend is even more lovely than previously suspected.

More Australian Words and a bit of tree

goldie — Tue, 11 May 2010 19:57:32 +0000

So, phone calls this week mentioning not knowing my slang have reminded me to add some more Australian words here:

retreads: tires that have had rubber put back on them…old women wearing tight spandex…old men who play at being boy soldiers

ringbarking: cutting or eating the bark in a strip all the way around the outside of a tree, thereby killing it.

king snake: king brown, dugite, bloody dangerous snake that can make you really sick or kill you if it bites you. Fortunately not fond of people.

“our native friends”: indigenous Australians, aboriginals.

gidji: a kind of sharpened wooden spear for stabbing at stuff. My Mum used to scream at us for chasing each other with gidjis. She’d yell”You’ll take out an eye with that!” Eye, nothing…we wanted to take out brains.

salmon gums:

jarrah:

golden wattle:

ironbark: Just because I love it so, here’s a poem about ironbark. Gilded youth. Oh I love it.

mallee: