Rosalind Goldsmith
Rosalind Goldsmith lives in Toronto. She teaches evening classes in an adult literacy programme. During the day she drinks too much coffee, writes, reads, and usually manages to avoid cat videos on YouTube.
Rosalind has written radio plays for CBC Radio Drama and a play for the Blyth Theatre Festival, and has also translated and adapted short stories by the Uruguayan writer Felisberto Hernandez for CBC Radio. She began writing short fiction five years ago. Her short stories have appeared in journals in the UK, the USA and Canada, including Flash Fiction Magazine, Litro, Spelk, Understorey, Filling Station, the Blue Nib and Burningword Literary Journal, among others. New stories will appear this year in the Chiron Review, Fiction International and others.
Q: If you could travel back in time, which of the great writers would you like to meet and why?
A: If I could travel back in time, I would not want to meet any great writer. I think I would be far too terrified to ask a good question or to listen to an answer. But I would like to be sitting at the next table at the café in Paris where Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett spent an evening.
Q: Is there a book that you keep going back to, and if so, how many times have you read it?
A: Paul Celan’s 70 Poems, translated by Michael Hamburger. I don’t know how many times I have read these poems, but I don’t think I will ever stop reading them.
Q: If you could teleport yourself anywhere, real or fictional, where would it be and why?
A: Nikolai Gogol’s Petersburg. First, I would visit Akaky Akakievich and give him my down-filled green coat. Then I would wander down Nevsky Prospect, follow the Nose into the church – and then out of it – to see where it went. And finally, I would visit Medji and discuss various dogs I have known, especially one that bit me. I would want to know her opinion of cats and whether they should exist or not.
