Hi folks. If you tuned into This American Life today, you heard Starting From Scratch, which featured Jonathan Goldstein’s “Adam and Eve” story which is featured in his book, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bible! and has appeared on Wiretap a couple times as well. It’s an interesting piece since it was aired in the pre-Wiretap days back in 2003. Jonathan Goldstein mentions the process of paring down his Adam and Eve story for This American Life over at Transom Review:
I do write stories with a length in mind. I don’t mind doing that. It’s like painting on a canvas of a certain size, if that makes sense.
In the case of this recent Adam and Eve story, it was drawn from a larger work in progress. I started with about seven thousand words, and played around with it until it was 2500 words, and of those words, after all the editing and revising, most of them ended up just being replaced with new stuff. I wonder if it’ll be difficult to get back to the original story I had started. I had all this writing about the snake bragging to Adam about how he’s able to have sex with all these bigger animals in the garden by stiffening himself and using his entire body as a phallus. There’s this long description the snake gives of pleasuring a zebra for three hours straight while the zebra gallops all across the land in a state of ecstatic insanity. It was all stuff that would not work on the radio.
Obviously, this little x-rated bit didn’t make the final cut. If you missed it, give a listen to Wiretap episode Adam and Eve, which Jonathan Goldstein performed live in season five. And, of course, it’s the first story in Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bible! If you enjoyed Jonathan Goldstein’s take on the Bible, be sure to check out his other retellings of the Bible.
