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Almond’s joy
Boston author Steve Almond sets himself to music in My Life in Heavy Metal
BY TAMARA WIEDER



Steve Almond is in the midst of a rock-star-like tour of America. He jumps from Durham, North Carolina, to Washington, DC; from Hartford to Jackson, Mississippi. He pays a visit to New Orleans, drops into Miami, jets up to Ann Arbor, over to San Francisco, down to El Paso.

But Steve Almond is not a rock star. Steve Almond is a writer. A writer whose first collection of stories, My Life in Heavy Metal (Grove Press, 2002) has garnered both criticism and praise for its unflinching look at relationships sexual and emotional, tragic and triumphant. His whirlwind book tour has given the Boston-based author and Boston College creative-writing teacher the chance to bring his stories — including " The Pass, " recently honored with a Pushcart Prize for short fiction — to the public. It’s an opportunity he’s relished.

Q: You’re up pretty early for a writer.

A: Yeah. I’m a morning person. It’s probably not going to seem like it from this interview, but that’s when I do my work. My theory is that when you sleep, all this interesting, strange stuff happens, because you’ve just had your dreams, and your artistic subconscious has been bubbling around and telling its own stories, so that’s when I write. I write from, say, eight to whenever I can stand it, which usually isn’t very long. And then, you know, the rest of the day I beat myself up about the rest of the aspects of my life, but I don’t have to beat myself up about not having written. It’s a guilt-alleviation program.

Q: Why the book? How long in the making was it?

A: Well, I’ll sort of take you back a little more. I was a reporter for seven years, and basically didn’t really have the guts — or the self-esteem, maybe, is a better way to put it — to try to be an artist or writer; it wouldn’t have occurred to me even to write a short story when I was in my early and mid 20s. I just didn’t feel confident or secure enough as a person to try and do something as outrageous as write a short story or something that was so personal. So I did journalism, which I loved, and which I think was a great blessing. I knew I wanted to work with words, obviously, and language, but I sort of wanted to do something that would give me more immediate validation. When you’re a writer, or you’re trying to be a writer, what the hell are you? You’re just some sort of pathetic wanna-be who’s trying to be creative in a culture that’s just trying to push tennis shoes.

I ended up starting to write short stories on the side in Miami, where I worked for the weekly [newspaper] down there. And then I realized there were these things called MFA programs, which, I know it’s very fashionable to tease [people in] them and give them a hard time, but [the programs] are really amazing in the sense that they’re kind of like a welfare state for two or three years for aspiring artists, and they help people like me, who aren’t brave enough to say, " Oh, I’m a writer and I’m just going to get up every day and try to write, " and maybe even don’t have the money to afford it, to make that transition. So I did that from ’95 to ’97, and was writing stories, most of which really sucked.

I moved to Boston specifically because I wanted to teach, and I also knew it was a good literary community. I went to a ton of readings, which I think are incredibly inspiring. I ended up writing and publishing stories for a while; maybe the last five years I’ve been able to get some stories taken in magazines, but just the way that the publishing industry works, it’s incredibly hard to get a short-story collection sold. Anybody who has a short-story collection out — or a novel, for that matter, but especially a short-story collection — I think has got to be tremendously talented, just because it’s so difficult.

Q: What about the stories in this book?

A: I started writing material that was more autobiographical three or four years ago, and a lot of it did deal with the suffering of desire and heartbreak, and specifically in the context of romantic relationships, with what I hope is an unflinching look at sexuality, and the way that men and women sort of throw their bodies before their hearts in relationships. So I started writing those sorts of stories, and I hadn’t previously. If you’ve read only these 12 stories of mine, then probably it seems like, gee, this guy writes about sex a lot. Which is okay; I suppose I do, or I certainly find it incredibly compelling, maybe the most interesting human interaction. Sex is pretty damn interesting. All the senses are involved, it’s a deep act of intimacy, and it has real deep meaning, despite the characters and even me in my life and people in my life always hoping and supposing and fantasizing that you can just toss one off and it will be cool and your bodies will be happy and your souls won’t be at all disrupted. And it’s like, fuck that. That’s bullshit. Every time you get naked with somebody, you’re getting naked with them, and it’s a big, big deal.

Q: What do you think of the reviews so far?

A: Anybody who reviews your book, anybody who fucking reads your book, you just thank that person, because they’re doing you a huge favor. But it’s painful to have your work dismissed. I hope I’m not writing about male issues or female issues or this era or that era; I’m trying to write about heartbreak and the suffering of desire, and that isn’t something that’s limited to an age bracket or a demographic or any of the rest of that crap. Sadly, but inevitably, that’s a human experience. I think part of what’s happening with the book is that it gets played as a particular kind of book, a zeitgeist book or a book about male sexuality or about confused such-and-such. That stuff is as bad as the marketing. It’s anti-artistic.

Q: Would asking you which story is your favorite be like asking a mother which of her children she loves most?

A: I don’t think it’s as dramatic as that, because children, I hope, are a lot more important to their mothers than stories are to their authors. And I guess I want to say parenthetically — parent-thetically, ha — you know, my dad’s reaction to the book, and he’s an incredibly sweet, thoughtful, smart guy, was, " Hey, good job, kid; it’s time for you to get married. " And he meant that really deeply, that the deepest human experience you can have is to have a wife, that long, good promise, or to have a mate of whatever kind, and then to have children, to have a procreative family, and to care for your children. I think writing and being an artist is amazing — I’m totally committed to it, I love it — but I think the most amazing thing out there, and I look forward to it and pray every day that it happens, is to meet somebody and have a family and raise children. Because you can try to impact the culture and be a big deal and make lots of noise, but in the end you have the most profound effect on those people who are closest to you. [Parenting] seems to me the most profound act of good you can do on earth, in your brief stay.

That said, all that caveat, I guess it sort of shifts around. I think of a story like " Valentino " as maybe in some way being the most deeply felt, because it doesn’t have the flashy language, and it’s very sweet and moving for me to read it and also to have an audience sort of assure me of that. In terms of writing, I think maybe the most ambitious is " Heavy Metal, " just in the sense that so many things sort of come together there that don’t feel like the material of literature, like heavy metal and female ejaculation and so forth.

Q: How much of you is in your characters, and is there one you relate to most?

A: A lot. Look, I think all that coy stuff, people saying, " Oh, I made it up, " and, " You know, it’s fiction " — everything that you write, if it’s any good at all, is deeply coming from inside of you. I mean, Holden Caulfield is at the deepest part of J.D. Salinger. He summoned up Holden Caulfield. At the deepest part of Nabokov, he summoned up Humbert Humbert. Where did those guys come from? They came from the deepest parts. The deepest, most sacred fears and desires and grievances and elegiac wishes of an author are in their characters. So a ton of me is in all of those stories. And a lot of it is autobiographical. I did review heavy-metal music, and I have screwed up in my personal and romantic life. There isn’t a story in there, or a story that I’ve written, I hope, that isn’t deeply, deeply personal. I don’t think there’s any other kind of art, other than deeply personal art. Or if there is, I’m not interested in it. I’m not interested in art that’s about ideas; I’m interested in art that’s about people, which often leads to ideas. Is that a totally cheesy, evasive answer? I mean, the short answer is, a lot.

Q: Tell me about this book tour.

A: It’s fucking rock and roll, dude. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done. It’s so great. I told Grove [Press] that I really wanted to get out there; I think there’s something incredible that happens when an author is able to read a story in front of an audience. I love to do it. I stay in my cage quite obediently — I have, for the last six or seven years, for most of the time. They let me out to teach, they let me out for the odd date, they let me out to play squash and poker, but aside from that I’m in the cage, and I wanted terribly badly to be able to read these stories to people. And I also thought that the way that this relatively obscure short-story collection was going to get noticed was if I had the chance to take it directly to the people. And it’s been amazing. There are authors who don’t like to read; they want to just write the stuff and have it out in the world and have people respond to it in that way, and that’s fine — bless them for making the art, and there should be no other requirement on an author. It would be fabulous if I felt like I could put this book into the world and I didn’t have to do a single reading and it would still get noticed. That’s not true. But even more important than that, I wanted to go out and read these stories every night.

Q: What are the three most important things you tell your students?

A: Fuck style. Tell the truth. Don’t try to be a writer; tell stories, be a storyteller. And I guess a couple of other things that are really important: slow down where it hurts. My theory of stories is quite simple: readers only care about two things. They’re asking two questions anytime they enter a story: who do I care about, and what do they care about? And the other thing I’ve realized after a lot of trial and error is that plot is really very simple: it’s that mechanism by which a character is forced up against their deepest fears and desires. So I tend to run workshops that are very focused on students allowing whatever natural voice is in them to come out, and then writing stories that really are, at some essential place, about desire. When I have students who bring in conceptual stories and stories about ideas, I’m just like, " This is nonsense. I want to know who you are, and what your internal life is, and that’s what the reader wants to know. So don’t be afraid to get personal, because that’s what we’re waiting for. "

Q: How do you define desire?

A: I’m trying to avoid sounding more pretentious than I have so far. Let me say this: I think desire is the human engine, and I think it is operating at every moment of the day. Sometimes there’s a little impulse: I want to touch that woman’s skin, I want to have sex with that person. Sometimes it’s a lot less sexy than that, it’s: I want to kill that person, I’m so angry at that person. Desire is really hard-wired into us, it’s why we do things. Desire is just wanting something, and the thing is, we’re constantly walking around with want messages flashing through, and the corresponding, " Don’t want that, " " You shouldn’t want that, " " I’ll never get that so it’s useless to want. " People, I think, would be much better off if they were more alive to desire, but then again, they’d probably be in a lot more pain.

Steve Almond reads at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut Street, in Newton, on June 25, at 7:30 p.m. Call (617) 244-6619. Tamara Wieder can be reached at twieder[a]phx.com.

Issue Date: May 24, 2002
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