Daniel Goulden
ORP: Do you write or create with an audience in mind? If so, how do you consider the relationship between that audience and your work throughout your creative process?
Daniel Goulden: My audience is anyone who feels the need or is open to reimagining the ancient Hebrew canon, the mythologies that define our society. At a dinner with some Jewish friends, they spoke about how difficult it was to talk to their parents about Israel's war in Gaza, which Amnesty International terms a genocide, and how they were rethinking their own relationship with not just Zionism, but Judaism as well. In that moment, I realized that they would have soon children to whom they would teach their values, a generation of young Jews, soon to be born, who will hold radically different beliefs about their own religion than their grandparents. That new generation will need a way of engaging with Judaism and I hope that my writing can be of use. I want my writing to be a part of a growing movement to rethink and reimagine what it means to be Jewish. The Israeli government uses interpretations of Jewish mythologies in service of the oppression of the Palestinian people. I want a vision of Judaism that interprets its own mythologies in service of equality, justice, and freedom. I aim to engage with the mythologies of Judaism (some of which are wonderfully strange) as a way of revitilizing my own culture and engaging with it on my own terms as a trans/non-binary person.
ORP: What is the most valuable piece of advice you’ve been given about writing or creating? What advice would you give to another writer or artist?
DG: Finish. Your. First. Drafts. It is so easy to fall into the trap of constantly revising as you write and ending up in that horrible position where you make no forward progress because you constantly delete and rewrite what you have written. No matter how hard it is to do, we writers much embrace what a teacher of mine called the "big, beautiful messes" that are our first drafts. The revision is when we go back and turn that mess into a true work of art. Brilliance is not getting it perfect on your first try; that's impossible. Brilliance comes from the slow work of revising a piece over and over until it leaps from the page with a life of its own. My advice is always: write your first draft, get it all out, then you can revise.
ORP: What do you hope readers (or your audience) will take away from your creative work?
DG: I want readers to ponder the stories and mythologies that ungird how we think of the world. Our shared understanding of these mythologies impacts the way we perceive things, even if we don't necessarily share the dominant interpretation. For example, in the bible, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is actually a tale about being kind to strangers, not a homophobic screed, but it is has been interpretted as the latter for thousands of years. The end result is a shared cultural understanding of a "city of sin" that is very hard to shake, even if you as an individual find the whole idea ridiculous. It is only through engaging with these stories that we can change these broad cultural understandings.Our shared stories have been retold and reinterpreted a countless number of times over the millenia and they can be retold and rewritten again. Mythologies are not ancient tales covered in dust and unchangeable, but living and breathing narratives, told from one generation to the next, constantly changing in minor and major ways. I hope my readers feel inspired to dive in and retell and reinterpret the stories they have always known.
ORP: How does writing/art influence your worldview, and how does your worldview shape your writing/art?
DG: Since writing is an act that requires many hours of solitude, it can become so easy for writers to withdraw inward. For me, being a climate organizer is a fantastic way to engage in the world as a source of inspiration and perspective. Organizing requires one to learn the ins and outs of political systems, organize meetings, talk to thousands of people. It throws you into the world in a way that is completely overwhelming, but also fantastically grounding. Even in my writing that doesn't directly address climate change, I take inspiration from the human behavior I have witnessed as an organizer.
