telepathic paranoia

I’m super excited to announce that I have a piece up on The Millions!

Okay, it’s only The Millions’ tumblr… A short recap of Steve Almond‘s recent reading here in Moscow, ID to promote his new book, God Bless America. Still, it’s exciting for me because I adore The Millions and the way their posts feed my brain, so it’s exciting to contribute to that.

As it happens, inspired not by the giddy freedom of having at last turned in my thesis, I volunteered not only to do this write-up, but also to introduce Almond the same night. Here’s what I said, before I inelegantly dropped my notes on the floor just as Almond started for the mic.

Steve Almond is the author of five books of nonfiction, including Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America and Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life. He is also the author of five books of fiction, including the newly-released God Bless America, available for sale here. (God Bless America is published by Lookout Books, which happens to be run by Ben George, a 2005 graduate of the UofI MFA program). Almond has won two Pushcart awards and been featured in Best American Short Stories multiple times.

But as impressive as all that is, I volunteered to introduce Steve Almond tonight, because ever since he came here as Distinguished Visiting Writer my first year, I feel like his spirit has haunted this program. The younger generation can tell you how those of us who were in his class talk about Almond as if he were one of the Gods, stepped down from mt olympus to slum with us for a while. That week, my first semester here, he set an example for us of exactly what a writer should be.

He taught us to avoid unnamed narrators, not to keep secrets from the reader, and to never, ever use the word “beacon” in our writing. Ever. But even more than those nuggets of practical good sense, Almond taught us that a writer should be fearless. He taught us the importance of humility. And he taught us that when you have something really important, really big, and really discomfiting to say, laughter will always sweeten the pill.

An example. On I believe it was the second day of class, Almond stood in front of the student being workshopped and lambasted him to his face. In fiction worshops, we are usually very careful to be delicate, to focus on the text itself, and there is a convention that we behave as if the author were not in the room. Almond respected none of these conventions. Speaking directly to the student, he said, “You have allowed poetry and pretty language to get in the way of telling a story. I’m going to spend the next ten minutes humiliating you for doing this. But it is only because I hope that if I beat you up enough, you will never make this mistake again.”

The rest of us sat there in silence, in horror, listening to the diatribe and not knowing how to react. We were afraid the student might go to pieces over the beating he was getting. Then at last, around minute 8, he starts chuckling. Then giggling, then full out laughing. And at the end, he swears solemnly never to make the mistake again.

The rest of the week was spent with us all pretty much in stitches, because we knew now we had permission to laugh. And that was a good thing, because without that laughter, there might have been some tears. But the important thing was, we all walked away with a big dose of truth, and we’ve become better writers because of it.

Just to keep it in the family, I’ll close with a quote from Ben Percy, who was our fiction DVW this year:

“Steve Almond is one of our most prolific-fearless-political-hairy-intelligent-sexy-hilarious writers…. He makes me care deeply about his characters, so many of them wrong in the head and right in the heart, down on their luck but clinging to the desperate hope that the next hand of cards will turn up flush.”