Robert Goble’s novel Across A Harvested Field (Amazon | Parables) won the Marilyn Brown unpublished novel award earlier this year. Before we get to the interview, here’s the back cover blurb so you have a sense of what the novel is about (and also note its spiffy new cover art):
“To Jordan Fairchild, the dark-haired girl renting his basement apartment seems somewhat quiet and reclusive. Just a business arrangement, he thinks, as he watches her sign the name “Nattie Hand” on the contract. Though two thousand miles away, Celeste Betancourt, an attractive Georgetown graduate student he met through a mutual friend, has captured his attention. A budding friendship with Nattie soon begins to bloom. Little does Jordan know his girl-next-door renter is none other than the world-famous pop star, a.k.a. Natalia Antonali, who recently disappeared from the public eye; little does he know how much his friendship will come to mean to her, how, for the first time a love begins to grow, untainted by “Natalia,” and how she hopes Jordan never discovers the truth.”
For more about Robert, see his Facebook page, and read this LDS Living profile written by my sister Katherine.
I think by now most of our readers have heard about how you wrote Across A Harvested Field primarily during your lunch breaks at the school you work at as well as in the evening at home. I’d like to go back further than that — when and how did you first decide to begin writing fiction? And what was the genesis for the story that became Across a Harvested Field?
I’ve always been a book lover. There were periods of time when I would devour one author’s works after another, whatever I could get my hands on. As a younger reader I tended to focus on authors like Stephen King, Orson Scott Card, Tom Clancy, and Frank Herbert–King and Card being my all time favorites. I look back and picture myself the classic loner bookworm with the aversion to sports, sort of an artsy type who listened to Led Zepplin and wrote bad poetry. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I whole-heartedly discovered the meatier diets, the likes of Tom Wolfe, John Updike, Chaim Potok, John Steinbeck, Charles Dickens, and many, many others I could go on naming. Continue reading “A Q&A with Robert Goble author of Across A Harvested Field”
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