“Goobs” by Beston Barnett appeared in Issue 34 and can be read here.
We’d love to hear more about this story.
There is something creepy about adults who love kids’ stuff, who want to lose themselves in it. I’m one of course, at least on occasion. But seen from a child’s perspective, it suggests that there is nothing to look forward to in adult life, and that’s a creepy feeling. “Goobs” is about a daughter watching her mother regress into childhood, and how that changes the daughter’s interactions with everything around her.
What was the most difficult part of writing this story?
I was pretty clearly trying to channel Kelly Link when I originally wrote this. She is very much the voice of the modern fairytale for my generation, who wouldn’t want to sound like her? And then I was lucky enough to actually take a class with her at Clarion and found that she thought about writing in a very different way than I had imagined. It took me some years to subtract what was simply imitative in the story and to work out how to give “Goobs” some breath of my own.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
The writing of Sofia Samatar is a continuing revelation for me. There are a lot of interesting answers to the question of how to write non-Eurocentric fantasy floating around in the publishing world right now. Her “A Stranger in Olondria” (2013, Small Beer Press) is a beautiful one.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
A.S. Byatt is my favorite living author. In interviews, I find her witty, charming, and terrifyingly erudite. What would we talk about over clinking glasses of G and T? Sea creatures, alizarin crimson, glass-blowing, the Fibonacci sequence? She could explain to me how to see stories as colors, and I could teach her to love Wu Tang Clan.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
I’m working on a sprawling sci-fi novel about an intergalactic civilization with seven different alien species, each of which had their own idiosyncratic fictions of first contact—like War of the Worlds or E.T.—before they found one another. My main character is a professor of comparative literature. Nerdiest book idea ever!!
Our thanks to Beston for taking the time to answer a few questions and share this story. Read “Goobs” here: https://www.sequestrum.org/fiction-goobs.
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During the day, author Beston Barnett designs and builds furniture in San Diego. At night, he plays Romani jazz. The rest of the time, he writes quirky little stories in which he struggles–rarely successfully–to leave his characters living happily ever after. He has placed stories with Clarkesworld, Metaphorosis, and Speculative City. He is a graduate of the 2018 Clarion Workshop.