We sat down with Rosalind Goldsmith, author of Inside the House Inside (Ronsdale Press, 2025) and past Fatal Flaw contributor, to discuss her new short story collection, writing for sound, and the instinctive evolution of both a story and her writing style.

Brenna McPeek: What first inspired Inside the House Inside? Was there a particular story or idea in the collection that sparked its inception?

Rosalind Goldsmith: I’d been trying for quite a while to put a collection together, but nothing seemed to link the stories. Finally, when I juggled and read through them yet again, I discovered there was a link. All the people in these stories are excluded from society in some way. Homelessness, illness, abuse, depression or anxiety has taken them out of the “normal” world. They can’t participate in society and have withdrawn into their own minds.

BM: So, regarding your writing process for this collection, it sounds like the stories came together independently and then naturally coalesced around a theme?

RG: Yes, the stories were written independently. The theme of exclusion emerged when I put them together. That theme expanded when I spoke with Wendy Atkinson, the publisher at Ronsdale Press. We realized together that the idea of inner structures was also present in the stories, and so we changed the title of the collection to Inside the House Inside, which is also the title of one of the stories in the collection. 

My writing process is always instinctive. I never think of theme or style or craft as I’m writing a story. I listen as best I can to what the story and the people in the story want to say. 

BM: Many of your stories blur the lines between surrealism and reality. What role does genre and ambiguity play in your writing?

RG: Genre plays no role at all when I’m writing. I never write with the intention of writing a horror story or fantasy. I listen to the story itself, and it finds its own form and voice. It’s the same with ambiguity. I never think of it. If the story ends up being ambiguous, then that’s the result of the story’s intention.

BM: These stories often focus on setting, space, and spatial division—a house, a room, a sandbox, etc.—which then play an important role in your characters’ journeys. How do you see the relationship between physical space and emotional or psychological space in this book?

RG: I think we create emotional spaces within the built structures of the world around us. A house is never just a house. It’s filled with the psychic and emotional energy of the people who live in it. At the same time, we build structures within our minds that contain our emotional lives. These structures are built brick by brick out of memory, resistance, withdrawal, fantasy, pain. Having said that, this concept was not something I was considering when I wrote these stories. It was something I discovered after I’d written them.

BM: You are a master of long, rhythmic sentences that lead a reader deeper into the strange worlds of your stories. How did you develop this distinct syntactical style?

RG: This is something in my writing that I did work on intentionally. I read all the novels in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s series, My Struggle. I was fascinated by his prose style. He uses comma splices all the time. His sentences are long but interrupted, sometimes even gasping. His style is hypnotic, and full of life and energy. His sentences follow the breath, not the rules. I learned from reading his novels that a sentence doesn’t have to be grammatically correct to work as a sentence. In fact, there’s a freedom in breaking the rules. I worked a lot on freeing myself from the “normal” sentence, which can only reflect a “normal” world. And because I chiefly write for sound and rhythm, this is also what I aim to do—to follow the breath.

BM: You have such a talent for writing atmospheric flash fiction that digs quickly and deeply into a reader’s heart and mind. What draws you to flash in particular as a mode of storytelling?

RG: Flash is a wonderful form for experimenting, and I love to take risks with form and with language. Also, practically speaking, when I wrote these stories, I had no time to work on longer pieces. It’s a great form to work in if you have little time, as so many of us do, because you can come up with the core of a story quite quickly, and go back to it again and again until it grows into itself.

BM: What artistic work influenced Inside the House Inside?

RG: There was no particular influence in this collection, but I have many influences that over time have become a part of who I am. I love the stories of Felisberto Hernández, Lydia Davis, George Saunders, Wolfgang Borchert, Amy Hempel, Guy de Maupassant, and the novels of Cormac McCarthy. I’ve been a fan of Dylan Thomas since I was fourteen. 

I’ll mention one reading experience that threw me. In Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, there’s a little drawing of a coffin that he put into the novel! What is that?? It’s so many things but also exists as a violation. That stunned me. That little coffin broke down walls for me, erased the restrictions that we all grow up with that stop us from creating in the way we want to. It’s liberating seeing something like that! 

I also love the paintings of Francis Bacon. There’s a deeper truth that lies in the heart of distortion, I think.

BM: Looking back on the book now, has your relationship to it changed over time? From conception to writing, to revising and publishing?

RG: I learned a lot about publishing from Wendy Atkinson, the publisher at Ronsdale Press. It was a wonderful experience working with her. I can’t say my relationship with the collection has changed at all.

BM: What did you learn about your writing through the development of this collection?

RG: I did learn that I write for sound. I always read the stories aloud, and I often make changes based on rhythm and the music of a particular word. I also learned that my work in theatre as a stage actress for quite a few years really informs my writing now. Words are alive. Dialogue is not dialogue; it’s conversation. Characters are not characters; they’re people embodied in the story, embodied in words.

BM: What are you working on now?

RG: I’m about to record an audio book of Inside the House Inside for Ronsdale. I’m looking forward to that. I’m also putting together a second collection. And I’ve written a piece for theatre, which I’m revising.

BM: We always like to end each interview with the same question: what advice do you have for aspiring and emerging writers?

RG: You know, Zadie Smith, whose writing I love, said a wonderful thing. She said, “‘Rummaging through a bag’ is sleepwalking through a sentence.” That opens up so much. The question becomes: Why write what so many others have already written? Where’s the beauty in that? What is the point in sleepwalking? Are the rules you’ve been taught really your rules? If not, I would say: break them and find your own, or don’t have any at all.

I think it’s also important to read the writers you love, and read everything you can. It’s the best way to learn because you discover what you love, who you are as a writer. And here’s a difficult one: Write what you want to write, not what you think you should write, not what others have told you to write. Not so easy, since it takes a long time, I think, to discover what it is you really want to write. Karl Ove Knausgaard said a great thing about this. He said to write what you’re afraid of. I love this idea. It’s not obvious, and it takes time to discover that.

I would also say, finally, never give up on it, no matter what anyone says. If you send out stories, it’s a good idea to remember that no matter what happens to that story, someone will read it, and that someone may be the one who understands what you’re doing. It’s too easy to let rejections get you down, and it doesn’t help. I’ve had many rejections. I don't count them.

I’d like to thank Fatal Flaw for publishing the story “Panic Room,” which is in the collection. Your literary journal and journals like yours give writers the courage and the support to keep writing and sending out stories.

You can purchase Inside the House Inside here. 

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