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| Interview with Francisco Goldman |  | |  | |
interviewed by Whit Coppedge | |
Francisco Goldman's short fiction and journalism have been published
in Harper's, Esquire, The New York Times Sunday Magazine,
The New Yorker, Outside, Playboy, Buzz, and
Mas. His first novel The
Long Night of White Chickens won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First
Fiction.
The Ordinary Seaman was a finalist for the IMPAC Dublin International
Literary Prize and was named one of the Hungry Mind One Hundred Books
of the Century. Both novels were PEN/Faulkner finalists. He spoke via
email from Mexico City.
Whit Coppedge: You are known as both a journalist and a fiction writer. Did one spring
the other or have you always been drawn to both?
Francisco Goldman: Well, I really don't consider myself anything but a very occasional journalist.
In twenty years I've written maybe 12 pieces of journalism, and only about 2
pieces in the last decade. But because most of these were written from inside
a war setting, and a very controversial and divisive one - the war in Central
America in the '80s - this tag has sort of stuck to me in the United States.
In other countries, there is nothing at all remarkable about a fiction writer
working as a journalist. This is especially true of Latin America, where Garcia
Marquez (who even owns a newsmagazine), Vargas Llosa and Julio Cortazar among
others have written, or wrote, important political journalism.
WC: How did you come to write journalism in the first place?
FG: I was living in NYC and intending to go to MFA school. This was about 1979.
I hadn't been back to Guatemala since 1975, when I was in college, and drove
down from Ann Arbor with a bunch of friends. When I arrived in Guatemala my
Tio Hugo said, "Are you crazy? Don't you know there's a war on? The police station
in that pueblo (where our cottage was) was over-run by guerrillas two weeks
ago." So I moved into my Uncle's house, living in my cousin's room - he was
away at college. While there, I worked at my stories. These were - as were all
my stories at that time - ethnically neutral, somewhat urban and surreal. I
wanted a fictional world utterly free of national, ethnic, realist sign-posts
or specific identity of any kind.
I sent my stories up to MFA programs, and got in, but from Guatemala I'd also
sent a story to Rust Hills at Esquire. He published one, and then another,
and before I knew it, an editor there was asking me if I wanted to try my hand
at non-fiction. I wanted to go back to Guatemala and write a piece about what
was happening there. I was in my twenties, and the two parts of the world I
am from -the US and Central America - were essentially at war with each other.
I wasn't going to miss that - if only for the adventure of it. But of course
there was much more than that behind it. Writerly ambition was the real motive.
Throughout those years I did journalism. Mainly for Harper's. I'd stopped
writing short-stories. I knew I could survive on as few as two journalistic
pieces a year.
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