Tears in the WRITER

At the first reading of its first regular season, JaxbyJax Literary Arts will present Sohrab Fracis and Claire Goforth at CoRK Arts District at 7 p.m., Thursday, Jan. 26. After short readings, Sohrab and Claire will take audience questions. Wine and cheese will be in short supply, BYOB welcomed, donations appreciated.

You can read about Sohrab and his latest book, his debut novel, in Folio Weekly’s Nov. 20, 2016 cover story by Daniel A. Brown. The title comes from the graffiti tag “Gandhi Go Home,” used by a New Jersey anti-Indian hate group that called itself the Dotbusters in the late 1980s. Winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award for his story collection, Sohrab has always written about home — or, more accurately, the struggle of the immigrant caught between two worlds. Kipling may’ve said West and East would never meet, but he’d never met Sohrab Fracis.

After writing regularly for Folio Weekly for years, Goforth became editor in early 2016. Her first published piece concerned social media profiles that persist after the user dies, written after Facebook suggested she “reconnect” with her sister a few months after her death. She’s identified as a writer since she was eight years old.
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Tim Gilmore: You knew you were a writer, or wanted to be, or identified as such, from a very early age.
Claire Goforth: A teacher assigned me a poem. I was eight years old. I called it, “I Wonder Why.” Even then, I loved the process of writing and the release you get, and not long after that, I came home and said, “I’m going to be a writer.”

And were you writing on your own after that assignment?
I wrote throughout my childhood. Recently my mom was looking through old furniture, and she found my first “book.” I wrote it for the same teacher.

What was the assignment? Surely the assignment wasn’t “Write me a book.”
Actually it was. It was a gifted class in a rural community, and she saw that I had the inclination. She assigned me to write a book, but also to illustrate and bind it. I mean, it wasn’t leather-bound, of course, but I loved it.

Do you remember what it was about?
It was something about a princess, which is embarrassing.

You were eight years old. It’s OK. You don’t wear a tiara as editor of Folio Weekly and wave a wand at Dan Brown?
Only on Fridays.

Do you ever look back at your childhood or adolescent writing?
Oh, God, yeah; who doesn’t?

What do you feel when you do?
Sometimes I’m impressed with what I did at an early age. Sometimes I’m horrified. But whenever there’s passion to do good writing, there’s also craft —

Even at that early age?
— that has to be honed.

And you can see that when looking that far back?
It says that I kept plugging away.

You grew up in West Virginia. What effect did your childhood environment have on you?
It was a very small community. My graduating class had 19 people. We hiked and roamed through the mountains and my parents took us to exhibitions in D.C. I know what it’s like to know everybody, and to feel the incredible safety of that. When I later moved to Jacksonville, as my first real city, it terrified me and charmed me. I fell in love with it.

You fell in love with Jacksonville?
I did. I think part of the reason is that I come from such wide-open spaces. I grew up in a valley in a farmhouse built in the 1920s. My best friend’s house was two fields and a creek away. I like that Jacksonville is spread out the way it is. There’s so much going on, but there’s room to breathe.

When people make so much of the urban/rural divide in politics, do you think having grown up in a rural community helps you understand a city like Jacksonville?
I remember this one family, one of those Christian denominations that don’t celebrate holidays, and these kids sitting in the hallway away from Halloween parties at school. Very conservative, but I remember this place where we’d all go and party. We called it “The Bridge” or “Shit Creek.” And these boys would go and pick up trash afterward, and if they caught kids throwing trash into the river, they would ostracize them and shame them. They were staunch environmentalists, but I’d be very surprised if they aren’t also now “Make America Great Again” people.

What brought you to Jacksonville?
Florida Coastal School of Law. If this writer and editor thing doesn’t work out [laughing], I guess I have something to fall back on.

But this “writer thing” is what you chose away from practicing law.
I always had the mindset that I’d practice law, then become financially stable, and eventually I’d get to a place in my life where it was time to write. Then I decided, “Fuck that. I need to be happy when I wake up in the morning.”

Your first published piece was just after your sister passed away.
Yes.

Older sister?
I was 28. She was 32. She caught swine flu, H1N1, and, um, she died in her sleep.

Even if I didn’t have two daughters, God, I just can’t imagine dealing with this kind of thing. How, um, how were losing your sister and relaunching your writing, how were they related?

Life is short, Tim, and even if you know that, it can be shorter than you expect it to be.

You’ve mentioned that [longtime Arts & Entertainment editor] Dan Brown was influential for and gracious to you.
I had a friend who somehow knew Dan. My sister had passed away, but Facebook was sending me messages that I should reconnect with her. I remember talking to Dan, I was at the beach, it was winter, the wind blustered and I talked and talked and he encouraged me to write that first piece.

You’ve been editor at Folio Weekly almost a year. What sense of responsibility do you have?
As we move toward a Trump presidency, and as hard-hitting community news has declined nationwide, Folio Weekly’s more important than ever.

How so?
The journalistic call to speak truth to power is a sacred obligation.

Is that sacred obligation there in all writing?
I think so. To different extents. And there’s that Robert Frost quote: “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.”

You’ll be sharing your fiction on Jan. 26, alongside Sohrab Fracis, at the first-ever monthly JaxbyJax reading. Jacksonville knows you as a journalist and editor. What can you tell us about what you might read?
I’ll be reading a story called “The Hunter.” Here’s the opening: “Sam sprays poison and thinks about his mistress’s tits.”