🎙️ Jeff Goldberg

Read Jeff’s story, The Last Apple Cider Donut, on Foofaraw now!

What would you do for a free donut?

Are they vegan?

Have you ever—theoretically—bumped or knocked over an elderly person on accident?

Why would you ask me that question? What have you heard?

What’s the longest line you’ve ever waited in?

Ugh, embarrassing, but forty-eight hours on a sidewalk to get tickets to the premier of Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. Also, I’ve just learned that the official way to write that title is using an em-dash with spaces, so that is another problem I now have with that movie. This is America and we don’t put spaces around our em-dashes here.

Do you think Ted went back to the zucchini festival the next year? If yes, does he get his donut?

This is actually an important question because it speaks to the psychological fallout from social media infamy. Does Ted go back to living a normal life in his town once the all-seeing-but-with-an-extremely-short-attention-span Internet eye shifts to the next viral outrage? Or does he end up packing up and moving because he never lives this down? And, if it’s the latter, is it because his friends and neighbors won’t forget, or is it because he can’t forget, forever assuming everyone is judging him even when they’ve long since moved on? No one else is ever thinking about you as much as you are thinking they are thinking about you, because they’re all busy thinking about how much you are thinking about them. But, in this extreme case, I don’t know. Either way, no way he goes back to that festival again.

Do you think you would’ve spoken up on the third or fourth time the older woman cut the line?

God, no.

What’s your go-to donut place and order?

Before they closed up shop in 2016, Cinnamon Snail was a vegan food truck in NYC with award-winning donuts. (They used to beat out the non-vegan competitors.) I technically worked from home at the time, but I always went to the corporate office on Wednesdays because on Wednesdays Cinnamon Snail parked nearby. I still occasionally think about their strawberry cheesecake donut.

What's a great short story you’ve read recently?

I’ve been reading a lot of amazing stuff! I am loving the dada issue of Exacting Clam, especially “Turn, Re-” by L J Pemberton. But that’s a poem, so an invalid answer! One of my recent favorites is “A Donkey’s Tale (or How the Two Renés Quarrelled)” by Jude Cook, published in Fictive Dream.

What book are you reading right now?

Helen DeWitt’s Your Name Here. A metafictional ouroborus with her classic humor and wild momentum and over-the-top erudition.

Please promote your writing (or friends' writing) that has been published elsewhere (or anything else you'd like to promote)

I’ve got a novelette coming out in February, published by ELJ Editions. It’s called, “There Are Infinite Universes and All of Them Are Boring.” (Do you put novelette titles in quotes or italics?) It’s part corporate satire, part rant about how movies get multiverse theory wrong, part monograph on free will. Just what the masses are clamoring for in their ceaseless hunger for novelettes.

For something that is actually already in existence: I am just crazy about The Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife by upfromsomedirt. It’s such a phenomenal poetry collection. I don’t actually know upfromsomedirt so technically I’m still not answering your question as I’m not promoting a friend. But it’s just such a great collection and I keep picking it up to reread poems and I want to talk about it with more people.

How does it feel to be the new editor-at-ease of Foofaraw?

I think the important thing for everyone to know is that my short story was accepted for publication before I started doing very occasional editing for the magazine. This was not favoritism! All other lit mags should know: if you publish my short stories, there is a chance I will offer free labor.

Thanks to Jeff for this delicious conversation about waiting in lines.