Goshgarian’s Sidebar: The Literary Life

“There are different ways to publish now. One writer I know, Ron McCarty, an actor, wanted to produce a book just as an audio. He self-published it and it was available on Amazon. Someone gave it to Stephen King, and he called it one of the best books he’d read (or listened to) in years. He called his literary agent and there was a bidding war for the book, which was titled The Memory of Running. McCarty had actually written the story years before, and so it was finally published as a book.”

In a sense, Goshgarian comes by her interest in and sympathy for fiction writers through personal experience. In 2000, she published a novel herself and in some respects, it was an agonizing effort. She became involved with a company in Kentucky that turned out to be run by scam artists. They asked her to pay them a fee for publishing her book (something that no reputable, commercial publisher would do) and she ended up reporting them to the Better Business Bureau and the attorney general.

“I found out they had lied about almost everything and they were doing the same thing to hundreds of other unsuspecting writers,” said Goshgarian. “The AG in Kentucky just wasn’t interested in pursuing the case and eventually, I went to the FBI in Boston. They were interested and they took copies of all the documentation I had made of what had gone on between me and them. Eventually, the district attorney in Lexington, Ky. took up the case after it was publicized in the Washington Post and the people were tried for fraud and went to jail.”

Goshgarian ended up publishing her novel herself. Titled The Arbitrary Sword, it is based on her maternal grandmother’s experiences as a survivor of the Armenian Genocide.

She said, “She was from Kharpert, and her parents were relatively well to do. Her father, who had a farm, took in an orphan boy and he and my grandmother were married. He had a brother in the US and escaped but my grandmother was left behind on the farm in Turkey with her mother and her two sons.”

A Kurd offered to marry her and she did live with him for three years, but after World War I ended, she was able to leave and join her husband in Watertown,  Mass., where he worked at the Hood Rubber Plant. Both Goshgarian’s parents were born in the US and, she said, “They were the generation of Armenian-Americans who wanted to become American. They moved to Carlisle, where I think we were the only ethnic family in town. Sometimes I would take lamejun with me in my lunch box and the other kids would ask me what I was eating.” After elementary school, she attended the regional high school in Concord. Later she attended Boston University and received her master’s degree from Simmons.

“I never went home again,” she said. Later, Goshgarian also took some writing classes at Emerson College. She continued, “It was through writing the book about my grandmother that I connected with my Armenian past. I honestly did not even know that my grandparents had come from Turkey. My mother told me they never wanted to talk about the past. I don’t speak Armenian and my grandmother really didn’t speak English, but somehow, we were able to communicate enough so I could learn her story.”

Although Goshgarian has been able to affirm her Armenian identity, she does not attend an Armenian church and nor has she brought up her children to speak Armenian. Her husband is French-Canadian, and his first language is French, which they often speak at home.

Interested viewers can find the schedule for “Behind the Pages” online (www.behindthepages.com) and readers are likely to appreciate Goshgarian’s penetrating and intelligent questions that illuminate authors’ intentions and their characters’ motivations.