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Beth Goobie: Power and Survival

© Paula E. Kirman

If Beth Goobie is not one of Canada's most famous writers, she is definitely one of the country's most prolific. She consistently produces an average of two or three books a year, in a variety of different genres: poetry, young adult, drama, short fiction.

Goobie is also much more than a writer -- she is a survivor. Born into a family of pseudo-Christian cult members, she and her siblings lived a double life underscored by incest, ritual abuse, medical experiments, mind manipulation, and the paranormal. She wrote about her experiences in 1995's Scars of Light. The brutally realistic poems won her the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and was nominated for a Governor General's Award for poetry that year.

Therapy is an important part of recovery, and for Goobie, a large part of her therapy is writing. In 1997 she published The Only-Good Heart, a collection of adult short fiction which once again dealt with the themes of cults, what they do to their victims, and, most importantly, how they insinuate themselves into society.

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Kirman: When you first told me about the subject of Only-Good Heart, the first thing I thought of was Scars of Light. Did you intend at all for the books to be connected in any way?

Goobie: I am a cult survivor, and Scars of Light is autobiographical. The Only-Good Heart is a work of fiction, but of course I am informed by my own experience. It was funded by an Alberta Foundation for the Arts grant, and part of the funding was to talk with other survivors and with experts in the field. I was able to consult with a couple of very prominent American experts in the area of cults and ritual abuse and the paranormal, and they validated everything that I ran by them in terms of things I was hearing from other people, other survivors, and questions I had about my own experiences. And from that I composed the fictional narrative.

Kirman: How long did it take you to research and write the book?

Goobie: I wrote it during the year and a half period that I lived in Tofield [around 1995 or so]. Then there was another year of re-writing when I was working with Pedlar Press on it.

Kirman: So you wrote the first draft of it quite a while before it was published.

Goobie: 1995 to 1996, I think would be the years.

Kirman: Was it hard to find a publisher for it?

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