Steve Almond arrives at Brookline’s Booksmith on a cool October night. He skips down the stairs to the basement reading room of the popular independent bookstore in Coolidge Corner.
Immediately, several people approach him. First, the manager of the store, a mousy middle-aged woman with glasses. Then the marketing coordinator, a 20-something punk rocker wearing a Smiths T-shirt beneath a black suitjacket.
Almond chats with these two, as well as two younger girls who may be students. They look up to him; they crane their necks up to his six-foot height with a glitter of admiration in their eyes. He is friendly with all and brings several boxes of chocolates as a gift. These he places on a small side table near the cash register and the signing table where his book is on display.
He sits in the front row and flips through printouts of his essays, articles and stories, deciding what to read tonight. Young couples come in arm-in-arm and sit down. A single young man with ink stains on his fingers sits also. There are a few older people, but most are in their twenties.
The group is distinctly geeky and artistic. They are decked out in scarves and corduroy, hair dye and Converse sneakers. The punk rocker comes to the podium. Behind him is a sign that says ‘Writers and Readers Room.’
He introduces Almond as ‘The Duke of Dick Lit.’
Almond comes up. He hasn’t shaved and seems inordinately relaxed. He says, ‘I haven’t really decided what I want to read to you people yet. But I brought some chocolate. Let’s take two minutes and whoever wants chocolate should go get it.’
Nobody moves.
‘Look, if you guys don’t relax and go get some chocolate, I’m going to be personally insulted,’ he jokes.
The audience stirs and about half go get chocolate.
When they return to their seats, Almond has made his decision.
‘Was anybody at the Bad Erotica Reading I did a couple weeks ago?’
Nobody responds.
‘Well, you all missed out because it was a riot,’ Almond says. ‘Anyways, there I read what is perhaps the dirtiest, filthiest thing I’ve ever written. And I mean, that’s saying a lot because everything I write is dirty. But the point is, I’m not going to read that tonight.’
Instead he reads an essay called ‘Rock’n’Roll Will Save Your Life,’ which explains his fondness for heavy metal. ‘Heavy metal is the complete annihilation of thought in favor of instinct.’
He muses on how ‘metal chicks’ are hot, how cities are ‘factories of lurid dreams,’ and how the lead singer of his favorite band, Tesla, used to drive a septic tank truck for a living.
After this, he reads from the introduction he wrote for the collection ‘Because We Were Ugly We Made Pretty Things,’ about the preponderance of creative, unattractive people. Their ugliness inspires them to ‘wring beauty from the neck of shame.’ This essay includes the lines: ‘Only Faulkner was hot. But he was a drunk.’
After the reading, he fields questions from aspiring writers in the audience and signs about a dozen copies of his collection of short stories, ‘My Life in Heavy Metal.’ He also plugs his next rule-breaking event, Cover 2 Cover, a reading at a bar (instead of a stuffy basement), where the writers read from their favorite works by other writers, (instead of promoting their own newest books). This night, these events, these essays, these people – all are typical in Almond’s life. He is a writer among friends.
THE BOY WHO…
Almond was raised in suburban California, the second son of parents who ‘dabbled in hippiedom.’ He describes himself as an ugly kid.
‘I had buck teeth and bad hair. I was ugly, pug-ugly, fugly.’ When he was in the audience during his school play about the Vietnam War, he cut a fart in the middle of a dramatic pause. From then on he was ‘The Boy who Farted.’
Almond suspects that this event was a fundamental precursor of his artistic career.
After graduating from college, he says he became a journalist so he could sleep late and go see rock shows on salary. He moved to El Paso, Tx., where he was a music reviewer. Those years were the inspiration for many of the stories published in his book.
Fifteen years ago, he sabotaged his own career. He left the El Paso Times – a Gannett newspaper in Texas – and moved to Miami to write for a free weekly. His editor at the Times said, ‘Steve, what are you doing? You’re ruining your career. You’re not going in the right direction.’
Something compelled him to make the change.
‘I wasn’t sure about it, but I had a sense that it was closer to what I really wanted to be doing,’ he recalls.
Almond’s first story at the Miami New Times was about two beautiful, perky, 20-something women who were employed by the city to scrape up roadkill. Almond describes them as ‘gorgeous aerobic instructor types,’ and remembers one of the women explaining that she loved her job because she got to see different parts of the city and imagine what it was like to live in the beautiful houses. Then she would pull over and scrape a dead, decaying dog’s body off the pavement.
‘Of course, I could see this was a horrible irony,’ Almond recalled. ‘But also I was starting to see that I could write about characters and scenes and that itself would be valid.’
He learned about writing ethnographies, stories about regular people’s daily lives that are known as ‘color stories’ or ‘brights’ in the journalism world.
Almond started writing fiction incrementally, he remembers. Chatting at a party with a sister’s boyfriend, he discovered the man was a ‘smoke jumper’ – a firefighter who is dropped inside forest fires by helicopter. This sparked creative ideas in his head.
‘Fiction is really just improvisational,’ he says. By combining anecdotes and research from his newspaper articles, he had the seeds for his early stories.
After spending time in an Master of Fine Arts writing program in North Carolina – which he said helped him develop his ‘critical faculty’ through ‘seeing other peoples’ mistakes’ – Almond moved to Boston, a ‘big literary city’ where he knew he could get a teaching job.
HOT FOR TEACHER
He found the first few years difficult.
‘Young MFA grads want to teach because they have the literary fire in them, but it’s very hard to make a living as an adjunct [professor]. You only make $2,500-$4,000 per class, so you have to teach three or four classes to make ends meet,’ he explained. ‘If you’re working hard and being passionate and giving your students what they need, that burns you out.’
Almond was teaching at Boston and Emerson Colleges at that time, as well as helping adjunct professors form a union at Emerson. Now he advises writing students working on their theses and focuses his writing on journalism. His students credit him with pushing them to work hard.
Oliver Grigsby, a senior at Boston College, had Almond as a teacher. ‘[Almond’s] biggest strength as a teacher is that he has a no [B.S.] attitude,’ Grigsby said. ‘Creative writing is a business for him, not some fun elective for a business major. He isn’t going to pat your ego unless you really deserve it.’
Grigsby admits Almond can be ‘vulgar,’ but explains that Almond writes about sex because it’s ‘a good way to get at the deepest emotion of a character, which is what every story should be about.’
Almond also writes a regular column for Boston Magazine called ‘Urbanalities,’ which chronicles his adventures in Somerville, where he lives now.
He calls Somerville, a suburb of Boston known as a haven for the creative, ‘Slumerville’ and points out a bearded man with a dog who is talking to himself.
But he is amused by the teenagers out ‘strutting,’ and seems comfortable in his city.
‘The nice thing about Boston is that here it is really about writers,’ he says. ‘In New York it’s also about agents and editors and the commercial part, but here I know most of the writers, and most of them are cool.’
He has had more than 60 stories published in various magazines, from Playboy to Ploughshares, but struggled for two and a half years to find a publisher for his new collection. Last year Grove Press released ‘My Life in Heavy Metal,’ which contains 12 of Almond’s stories and has been quietly receiving good press.
But Almond is pessimistic about the literary state of affairs and is fighting his own crusade in Boston to change people’s minds.
‘The role that I’m playing in Boston is to bring literature out of the libraries and universities and get it into venues where people will realize how incredibly sexy and moving and exciting literature is,’ he says, ‘and not in some stuffy way that you have to have a Ph.D to understand.’
Almond is very careful about not turning these events – like the writers reading other writers event next week – into ‘gimmicks.’
‘It’s not about sprucing up literary events, it’s about saying ‘you don’t get it, literature is the show and [writers] are the people who keep us fully alive.’ We have to wake up this morally, intellectually and creatively lazy culture and it’s the artist’s job to do that,’ he continues. ‘People are hungering for a sort of emotional and creative nourishment and they don’t need to be talked down to.’
‘People are looking for an opportunity to go to something cool,’ he adds. ‘They’re looking to be connected, plugged into the emotional and creative grid of the world.’