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Smoking With Steve Almond by Meg Pokrass and Tara Laskowski Meg: Steve, can you comment on the two very menacing (and funny) front covers of your new, self-published book "This Won't Take But A Minute Honey"? Both are the handiwork of my insanely talented designer, Brian Stauffer, to whom I have promised my 3rd and 4th children. Brian and I worked together at the Miami New Times years ago and I've been dreaming of working with him ever since. In fact, the naked lady with thorns was actually the image Brian designed (at my request) for the cover of my first collection, My Life in Heavy Metal. But the publisher thought it was too graphic. So I wanted it for this book. The skull image is loosely based on the first story in the book. Brian wasn't sure it was any good, but the moment my wife and I saw it we were like ‘Hell yes.' This is one of the cool things about making your own book: you get to choose the other artists with whom you want to work. Meg: Your new book is two books in one, like a reversible rain coat! is small, light, slips in a pocket, is very fun to hold and read. How did the idea for this come about? So the first thing: I'm addicted to writing shorts. They offer a lyric intensity that I'm always jonesing for, those sudden bursts of empathy. I wrote shitty poetry for years, and some of my shorts are actually the rescued remains of shitty poems. So I knew I wanted to gather those into a book someday. I also knew I wanted to write about what it's actually like to try to write, the psychological and emotional issues that people smack into. And I know about these because I've smacked into them over and over. The essays are basically intended to save other writers at the beginning of their careers from making the mistakes I did, over and over, for like ten years. I wanted them mashed together because I figured, hey, if I'm going to sit there and lecture people like I'm Mr. Know-It-All, I might as well put my own prose on the chopping block. I also liked the idea that folks might be able to carry the book around in their pockets. One of my central preoccupations at this point is: how do we keep people reading books? Especially younger people who spend so much time in front of screens. I know people blab a lot about the Kindle and the iPad and all the rest of the whizbang technology, but my goal—now that the means of producing books has become accessible to slobs like me—was to create a new kind of book: smaller and stranger and more personal. Meg: I think it is very cool how you share your top lists of books and music in "This Won't Take But A Minute Honey". I am becoming a Steve Almond's music addict! Where can I update my files on your suggestions for music in the future, Steve? Will you be leaving me in the lurch? I am SO not leaving you in the lurch. For one thing, I've been sending out a list of recommended albums called The Tip for more than a decade. For another, my new book Rock & Roll Will Save Your Life is more or less dedicated to freeing your ass from the Ass Cage. Not only do I recommend, like, 7000 bands, but the book comes with its own soundtrack. Meg: Do you listen to music AS you write as a general practice? Yup. As I type this, I'm listening to "The One" by Cee-Lo Green. Next up: "Hip Hop Thighs #17" by Ike Reilly. Meg: What books are lying at your bedside or near your sofa or on your dresser or is this way too intimate a question? That's not at all intimate. If you've asked me what lubes were on my bedside, that might be too intimate, but books are still, as I understand it, legal, at least until Liz Cheney gets elected President. My bedside is totally dominated by kids books these days, most of which are great, though Curious George is definitely chocked full of creepy colonialism. But adult-wise, I've been loving Christine Sneed's forthcoming story collection, "Portraits of a Few People I've Made Cry." Totally astonishing and awesome! Also been enjoying Aimee Bender's new novel "The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake." If you ask me this next month, it'll be a whole new list. Meg: Do you REALLY not read one of the stories from your collection The Evil B.B. Chow in public now? What if the woman who had approached you and said "That story's not about skull fucking, it is about skull making love," had NOT BEEN BEAUTIFUL? Would it have had the same effect on you? So you're talking about the last story in B.B. Chow, "Skull," and this episode in which I read the story in public and this young woman came up afterward and reassured me as to the story's gentler emotional intentions. I'm pretty sure it was the fact that she got the story that made her beautiful. Tara: This isn't the first time you've played around with form. You co-wrote a novel, "Which Brings Me To You" with Julianna Baggott, which was a series of letters written back and forth between two characters. Can you tell us a little bit about that process as well? Also, would you possibly ever consider co-writing a novel again? Writing that novel was exactly like starting a romantic relationship: for the first few months we were just crazy about each other. You're such a great writer! No, you're such a great writer! Then, on the second draft, things got more real. Our characters began accusing each other of the stuff Julianna and I felt about each other. You're so callow. You're so self-righteous. By the third draft, we were going directly at each other. Lots of screaming. Lots of slammed phones. Lots of drama. But the fighting actually made the novel a lot better, because it allowed our characters' uglier, more damaged and conflicted sides come out. It put their relationship in peril. Which is what you want—for the love they might enjoy to feel earned rather than awarded. As for co-writing another book, if the right people was asking, for the right reasons, I'd be open to it. But it's a lot more involved than I expected, because it's not just the writing of the thing, but putting it into the world. Tara: You seem to be a very straightforward, no-bullshit kind of person, and many of your characters are the same way. They are upfront, honest and soul-baring on the page. I'm curious—do you ever have moments where you freak out about your skill, or are you mostly pretty confident about things? All artists freak out about their worth. It's part of what drives them—doubt, that perpetual engine. For me, the big challenge is my capacity to pay attention for long stretches of time, and to connect with characters over the course of several hundred pages. I'm still totally overmatched by the novel as a form. And I beat myself up about it about 20 times a day. But in the end, that's what a writing career is about: figuring out what you can't do, and setting that out as the next challenge. In the mean time, you have to try to take some solace in the things you can do—without using them as a crutch. Tara: Is it true that you used to make up shit in your submission letters to The New Yorker to try to get their attention? Yeah. When Bill Buford was the fiction editor there, I sent him a letter saying how great it was to talk with him about some Alice Munro story, and he actually wrote me a hand-written rejection note. It was one of many very stupid things I've done over the years. Tara: One of my most favorite short stories ever is your story "Geek Player, Love Slayer" in "My Life in Heavy Metal." In that story, you've got a first-person narrator who is female and says some pretty sexual stuff. I believe when I heard you read that story, you said that you'd gotten some criticism from people who said that women don't think that way, or asked you why the hell you think you can write from a woman's point of view. What do you say to those people? Um, sort of politely and with preemptive thanks for taking the time to read the story and have any reaction at all, which is a huge compliment, I say: tough titties. The idea that all women think and talk about sex the same way is beyond idiotic. The funny thing about that story is that it's based on a story a friend of mine told me, a wonderful poet actually, and she talks a lot like my heroine: she doesn't mince words or suffer fools. Tara and Meg (in unison): What can we expect to see from you next? The Rock & Roll book is out April 13, so I'll be doing lots of readings for that. And late next year, Lookout Books will publish a story collection called God Bless America. In the mean time, if I get a bee in my bonnet, I might self-publish another book based on my column for the Rumpus about bad poetry. Oh, and I'll be wiping a lot of tushies. |
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