A Fistful of Ink

Thursday's featured authors at the Brookline Booksmith were Steve Almond and Daphne Kalotay. I came in midway through Daphne's reading, and so missed much of her tale of familial psychosis at a wedding. Steve read from his epistolary collaboration with Julianna Baggott, entitled Which Brings Me to You. The concept is of a series of letters exchanged between a lust-tinged couple determining whether or not to get involved with each other. Steve's excerpt concerned one such letter which the male character penned while in a vulnerable state of inebriation, and a followup letter recapping his comi-tragic exploits in attempting to recover the first letter from the postal service. Pepper spray and a dinner roll were involved.

I've heard Steve read a few times now, both fiction and non (which in his case are not far removed), and he has always been excruciatingly entertaining. And I admire his daring. I plowed through his first collection of short stories called My Life in Heavy Metal, which is much more nuanced than its title might suggest. Emotionally his stories are a punch in the chest. As a writer he has an impulse to charge fearlessly into squeamish territory. And he knows exactly how to defuse tension with humor, which is how he pulls it off. He has no trouble blurting out things which others wouldn't dare mention out of politeness or fear or lack of notice. And there are some withering realizations. "There is a point you reach when you are just something bad that happened to someone else."

Almond has been in the news lately for resigning his post at Boston College in protest of Condoleezza Rice being invited to be the graduation commencement speaker. He addressed this hastily during the Q&A portion of the evening. He'd expected to come under fire from the rightwing, but was disappointed that the leftwing didn't use the publicity as a launchpad to attack Rice and expose her dishonesty. To those who applaud his efforts, his response is "well, thanks, but that doesn't really help the issue."