Rosalind Goldsmith’s short story “Inside the House Inside” appeared in issue 8 of Variant Lit in Fall 2021. Rosalind’s debut fiction collection Inside the House Inside will be published by Ronsdale Press in April 2025 and available in the U.S. in May. It is currently available for preorder.
This interview was conducted over email in March 2025 between Suzy Eynon and Rosalind Goldsmith. It has been edited and arranged for clarity and length.
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Suzy Eynon: How did you go about organizing and ordering the stories in Inside the House Inside? As a reader, I loved the themes and references running from one story to the next, like the protagonist of “Worse” dreaming until he is startled awake and feels “sure he owned a dog,” followed by the characters sharing dreams (including a nightmare about a dog) in “Night Room,” to the wild dog of “In the Field.” It was satisfying to follow those lines through multiple stories. When did you know you had a central theme to this book?
Rosalind Goldsmith: You know, it’s funny, and probably the wrong way to go about things, but I don’t organize and I don’t plan. This has its drawbacks. Sometimes the patterns and sequences can be random, interrupted, broken. But I work instinctively at every stage, so themes and patterns, if they are there, evolve on their own. I try to impose my own ideas as little as possible. I never start from a theme. I discover a theme after the fact, if it’s there, and that’s often a surprise, or a shock. It’s luck, random. I love the play of chance.
I didn’t see a central theme to this collection for a long time. At first, I thought I didn’t have a collection at all, because there was nothing at all linking the stories. After a few years of shuffling, taking stories out and adding new ones, a kind of a theme did emerge: an exclusion from the norm that seemed to be consonant with all the stories. Another theme emerged when I changed the title of the collection.
SE: “Inside the House Inside,” the story you published with Variant, is the title piece from your book. How did you decide this was the title you wanted to use for the collection? I noticed many of the stories ask the reader the question of what or where a home really is, wrestle with this idea of home.
RG: Yes. Where do we live? Where can’t we live? The meaning and experience of home, of homelessness, have haunted me for many years. The first title of the collection was Chernobyl Dogs. (Chernobyl dogs live in an exclusion zone around Chernobyl.) The collection was accepted by Ronsdale Press under that title. But when Wendy Atkinson, the publisher at Ronsdale, and I discussed the title, we realized that it had already been taken. Also, it wasn’t a complete reflection of the collection. We went away and thought about it, and both of us came back with the same title, Inside the House Inside, taken from the story. I realized that many of the stories were about living inside the structures inside the mind, so that was another theme that emerged–not just exclusion, but retreat to an inner structure, which can be like a home, or in some cases a prison, as it is in the original story published by Variant.
SE: What drives you to write about children and to write from the perspective of children? “You___Body” was so striking to me because the “you” addressed in the piece is a child, and the reader is right there inside the child’s head when they experience this terrible thing, this split. Another story that comes to mind is “Still Child.”
RG: I don’t know what drives me to write about children. They hurt. I feel their helplessness like a gut punch. When they suffer at the hands of adults, they have no defense. The shock of pain and violation inflicted on a child is devastating. It creates a new and horrible template for their life. Children are constantly rewriting and reshaping the world, I think, depending on what they see adults do. They learn. They learn violence and defeat as easily as they learn addition and subtraction.
SE: You have written radio plays and for theater as well as short fiction. How does your creative process differ when writing a play versus a piece of short fiction? What initiated the start of your fiction writing after years writing in a different form?
RG: This was a practical switch. I loved writing radio plays, but the venue for that disappeared when CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) canceled the programming for radio plays. I continued to write plays for theatre but most of them were pretty awful, so I threw them out. I stopped writing plays after that. I think what got me into writing fiction, which I’d always resisted, was translating stories by the great Uruguayan writer Felisberto Hernández. These stories are magic. Because I spent so much time with them and loved every moment in their company, the short story form really came alive for me. Stories like “El Balcón” and “Menos Julia” revealed possibilities within the form that I’d never imagined possible.
SE: How do you think your experience in writing radio plays and for theater has shaped how you approach writing fiction on a craft level?
RG: I think my experience in the theatre (quite a few years as an actor before I began to write) gave me an awareness of structure–the shape and movement of a play and how important that is. There has to be some kind of movement, and some kind of shape to the piece. Most importantly, it has to be alive. In a play, the text is a living thing. Dialogue is not dialogue; it’s speaking. A character is a real human being, embodied in the actor. Subtext is real thought that sends out words and actions, and hides itself in the body.
Writing radio plays attuned me to the sound of words – the rhythms and inflections. Also, writing to an exact time–to the minute, in fact–helped me to condense and streamline my work. It also taught me that it takes a good long while to put something together. Patience is crucial.
I never think of craft deliberately. I never think of using this or that element of craft, like dialogue or word choice, to create an effect. It all evolves together, or it doesn’t. I listen to the voice of the story, and how the story wants to unfold. If it turns its back on me, it means I need to listen more. This doesn’t mean I don’t edit; I do, but it’s not intentional, if that makes sense. I’m just listening all the time–for sound, rhythm, thought, emotion. I will often leave a story for a long time, go back to it, and find something I didn’t hear the first time round that allows the story to find its voice. But sometimes that doesn’t happen, so I have a lot of discards too.
SE: What does your writing workspace look like? Where do you usually write?
RG: I live in a small bachelor apartment, so my desk is about four feet away from my bed. You know, it would be nice to have a separate writing space, but it’s ok. It doesn’t really make a difference. I lived in a flat once where my desk was less than two feet away from my bed. Actually, I could clean the whole flat without getting out of bed. The brilliant writer Ocean Vuong spoke of a time when he had to write in his bedroom closet because he had nowhere else to go.
SE: What does that moment of genesis look like when you start writing short fiction—does it start with an image, a thought. What inspires you?
RG: It starts with a person, a situation, an action, a moment. What inspires me is the way that words can come alive, the way they are able to not just represent an event, but actually be that event. I’m inspired by the possibility of making the thing the thing itself. It rarely happens, but that’s what keeps me going.
SE: I noticed a lot of animals referenced in the book: cats, dogs, horses. Do you feel a personal connection to animals?
RG: You know, I’ve never thought about that. But it’s true, there are a lot of animals turning up in my stories: birds, dogs, possums, mice. I’ve written two in which a horse is one of the main characters, and I’ve written at least four with cockatoos. I don’t feel a personal connection to animals, but I think they may be our familiars. We can project ourselves onto them, and they can become reflections of us. Or they are meaningful in some mysterious way…I’m thinking of Carver’s great story, “Feathers.”
SE: What advice would you give to yourself now, looking back, when you first began writing fiction?
RG: Don’t let rejection get you down! I’ve had so many rejections, it would be masochistic to count them. I would say, keep your head down and don’t stop writing. Putting the words together, letting them collide, burst or sing–that’s where meaning is. Be loyal to the story, and listen. Don’t worry if the story just doesn’t work. It takes a lot of shit to grow one flower, so the failures are actually just as important as the ones that get through somehow.
SE: Who are some of your favorite short fiction writers? Did any writers, books, or fiction works influence you as you pulled together your collection?
RG: Felisberto Hernández, Dylan Thomas, Jorge Luis Borges, Raymond Carver, Lydia Davis, George Saunders, Guy de Maupassant, Anton Chekhov, Wolfgang Borchert, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Walser. I’ve read many wonderful stories online, and ones I’ve never forgotten, such as Victor Lodato’s “Jack, July,” which I read in The New Yorker. That is a stunning story.
I would say there are some writers who break things open–in a way, they give permission–break rules all over the place and do something truly different–and these are the writers who are so inspiring. I’m thinking of George Saunders, of Cormac McCarthy, of Lydia Davis, of Karl Ove Knausgaard. I’ve been a fan of Dylan Thomas since I was fourteen. I wouldn’t say any of these writers have had a direct influence, but they have all become a part of who I am and of what I write.
RG: I’d really like to thank Variant Literature for publishing the original story “Inside the House Inside.” Your literary journal, and others like yours, truly give writers the hope and confidence to continue to write.
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Rosalind Goldsmith’s short stories have been published in over fifty journals in the U.S., U.K., and Canada. She loves to experiment with language and form. Before writing short fiction, she wrote radio plays for CBC Radio Drama, a play for the Blyth Theatre Festival and translated and adapted short stories by the Uruguayan writer Felisberto Hernández for CBC Radio. She is a volunteer facilitator with the Writers Collective of Canada and tutors literacy for adults. Rosalind lives in Toronto.
