Steve Almond is the author of two story collections, My Life in Heavy Metal and The Evil B.B. Chow, the non-fiction book Candyfreak, the novel Which Brings Me to You, co-written with Julianna Baggott, and (Not that You Asked), a collection of “Rants, Exploits and Obsessions” released in 2007. He and his family live outside of Boston. Keep track of Steve and read some of his work on his site.

(DJ): You end your recent Boston Globe piece on David Foster Wallace ( “A Moralist of Hope”, published 9/21/08) with the following:

“We have lost one of our most powerful imaginations, a man whose works provided us a means of rescue.”

To turn this inward, do you see your work in any way providing a means of rescue? Reading your fiction and non-fiction, you’re obviously OK with exposing yourself and putting yourself out there. Within this, readers have the chance to laugh at you, with you, and at themselves. There’s a sense of rescue to that, and I’m wondering if you feel the same.

(SA): “Rescue” is probably a little lofty in my case, but that’s the basic idea. Foster Wallace – like Vonnegut before him – was a guy who was openly concerned with the fate of the species, and the terrible moral decisions we make in the day-to-day. His work was full of complex ideas, and lots of sly irony, but it was also driven by a single idea, not at all ironic, which is that humans have a duty to take care of one another.

I’m not interested in writing – or art more broadly – that doesn’t have that kind of compassion at its center. I’m not saying I want to be preached at, but I want the author to have a Christ-like mercy for the people he or she is writing about.

(DJ): There’s this quote from a Jonathan Yardley review that you mention early in a 2005 Salon essay, “The Blogger Who Loathed Me”, and that also appears in (Not that You Asked):

“If Almond devoted a fraction of the efforts [sic] he brings to self-promotion to his writing, he might finally be on to something. But I doubt it.”

If the writer/author doesn’t go about promoting his/her work, then who does? To me it’s part of an old way of thinking that contributes to the “starving artist” archetype, as if we’re all meant to die drunk and penniless. I’d like to get your thoughts on the importance of self-promotion and what it takes for someone to get beyond their unwillingness or reluctance to do so, and approach it from a place of acceptance and even enjoyment.

(SA): The quote isn’t from Jonathan Yardley. It’s from the blogger. Yardley is a critic. It’s his job to focus on writing and whether it succeeds or fails, and how. Bloggers tend to focus on authors. My sense is that bloggers are sensitive to authors who “promote” their work because bloggers are, by and large, engaged in a pretty bald form of self-promotion.

As for my own career: I started as a short story writer. It didn’t take long for me to figure out that I was going to have to make some effort if I wanted people to find my work. So I’ve focused on doing the sort of stuff I enjoy and/or know how to do: readings, events, writing essays or Op/Eds. There are plenty of authors who don’t want to spend their time doing these things, who would rather devote themselves solely to writing, who are less needy for company. I have great admiration for them.

(DJ): Digging a little more out of the same Salon piece, you refer to the essay’s subject as being something of a mirror for you, representing “the desire to avoid the solitude and humiliation of sustained creative work, to choose grievance over mercy, to find a shortcut to fame.” Is this still something you guard against, considering how much of your work is out there now? Or do you feel established to the point where now you have a whole new set of worries?

(SA): I have a wife and two kids, so that’s definitely a whole new set of worries. But you never stop worrying about creative challenges. I’d like to feel that someday I’m going to be able to write a decent novel. I’ve written three of them at this point, all thoroughly suck-ass. But the main thing, I think, is to keep trying. Not necessarily to succeed, but to keep trying.

(DJ): At the end of the piece you write, “We both face the same doomed task: to write in an era that has turned away from the written word, to love the world in the face of considerable self-hatred.”

Do you still believe we’re in an end-state of writing and literature as we’ve known it, or is it a case where it’s time for writer/author/artist to evolve, embrace new technologies and find new ways to communicate the many layers of the human condition? Within this, as we go on living in the era of text messaging, are there still ears to listen and eyes to read?

(SA): I don’t know if we’re in an “end-state” exactly. But it’s obvious that our screen addiction has amphetamized our intellectual metabolism. When I was a kid, TV had, like, half a dozen channels. There were no computers, let alone cell phones or i-Pods. But the students I used to teach at Boston College grew up with those technologies. There’s nothing inherently wrong with technology, of course. But the bottom line is that the act of reading requires a sustained period of concentration. At least the sort of writing that asks the reader to enter into a fictional world, and to immerse themselves in the most complicated and sometimes painful emotions of the characters. What’s endangered at this point is the willingness – if not the capacity – to do that sort of work. Humans are still doing plenty of reading. It’s a question of how much that reading is making them feel.

(DJ): Thanks for being so willing to talk about some older pieces. It’s interesting to return to them through the lens of the last few years. I’d like to ask about a 2003 interview with Bookslut.com, discussing your first collection, My Life in Heavy Metal. You refer to our literary culture as “anemic”, then go on to say that we’ve “got to find a way to make people understand how important literature is.”

In five years, have things grown better or worse? How much of it depends on the writer getting out there more, being willing to self-promote and taking advantage of new ways to connect with readers?

(SA): I hate to sound like a gloomy Gus, but it’s gotten worse. People still read, and a certain segment of the population will always read, will find succor in that pursuit. But it’s a smaller segment.

I’m basing this on my own sense of the world. We’re a visual culture, fame-obsessed, pornographied, imaginatively stunted and in full retreat from our internal lives. In a lot of ways, we’ve made progress as a species. But in terms of our capacity for engaging with works of imagination, we’re headed in the wrong direction. A hundred and fifty years ago, people were arguing over the latest installment of “Great Expectations.” That was the hot new commodity.

(DJ): Let’s come back to the present then, something you wrote as Guest Editor for the Best of the Web 08. You mention something called a “backlog of bitterness” that pervades the blog world, and write about the phenomenon where we’re generating new books and new writers without any corresponding means of generating new readers. The “backlog of bitterness” then plays itself out on the Internet, with people taking aim at one another. You write, “That’s what most of literary content on the Internet boils down to – it’s not creating work….not even serious criticism. It’s gossip.”

If this is the case – and you’re careful not to blame the machine, but rather point out that the machine merely enables us – how do we point the ball in a new direction so it rolls along in a way that helps “reinvent literature”?

(SA): I don’t think there’s any sweeping solution. We live in a country – thank God – where people are free to say whatever they like. The problem isn’t that online commentators say mean things. It’s that other people consume those mean statements. That’s how they choose to spend their one and only life.

As a species we’re in pretty big trouble. Lots of blameless people are dying everyday. Our scientists tell us we’re pretty close to blowing the planet’s thermostat. Religion has become a tool of dangerous fanaticism. And the best we can do is to sit around saying mean things about each other? It’s so infantile, so sad. And it’s completely at odds with the role of art, which is to make us feel more human.

I can only hope that, as the world gets scarier and more chaotic, people will return to literature. Vonnegut says we’re dead if we don’t. And he’s been right about everything else he ever predicted.

J.D. Smith is an amazingly versatile writer who explores the art of telling a story, capturing an image, scattering truths and creating worlds from any number of angles and vantage points. His books include the collection, Settling for Beauty (Cherry Grove Collections), The Hypothetical Landscape (Quarterly Review of Literature Poetry Series), the edited anthology Northern Music: Poems About and Inspired by Glenn Gould (John Gordon Burke, Publisher), and The Best Mariachi in the World (Raven Tree Press), a recently released bilingual children’s book. Three of his poems, along with an excerpt from a 2005 essay, are featured on the Creative page. We conversed through email exchange, discussing his work and his approach.

DJ: The first thing that strikes me is your ability to move swiftly between genres and forms. You prove adept at moving between emotions and perspectives within a given piece – connecting what’s happening beyond the “I”, then projecting what’s happening within. I’d like to discuss your poem, “Elegy,” which is a wonderful example of this in-and-out movement.

The opening, coupled with the title, is a great set up for nostalgia:

“Dusk. The plangent geese migrate.
Ragged chevrons that used to bisect a continent
now settle near a golf course and the retaining pond”

Half-way through, it begins to read like a social and pop-culture commentary:

“…that bathes the climax
of a made-for-TV film
about the latest disease
or another private distress
raised to a social issue, if not elevated:”

Suddenly I’m spun in yet another direction, this one with a great sense of self-deprecation:

“From my depths, I’ve summoned
a spiral thread of hair, less than
what I could have called myself,
without affecting a second language:
asshole.”

With all these wonderful turns, you never lose the reader. We’re always watching a flock of geese settling near an office park. How do you keep yourself from getting lost when the landscape of the poem follows such a meandering course, moving, if you will, through a set of mental gymnastics?

JDS: What prevents me from losing the reader in a poem like that is not inflicting my first draft on him or her. My first drafts are usually considerably longer than the final version and include alternative versions of lines as well as lines and sometimes stanzas that don’t survive until the final draft. Over the course of multiple revisions I try to remove as many obstacles to understanding as I can. This means that over time I have to learn what is and isn’t essential in a poem, which leaps of association can and cannot be made.

As for moving among different tones and levels of languages, that’s something I’ve had to do all my life in dealing with people from different backgrounds. In my first 14 years I lived in a neighborhood with a sizable population of transplanted Southerners, and from kindergarten onward I have been in one or another setting with a variety of ethnic groups, educational levels and social classes. This has meant learning to speak a variety of “languages” on any given day and learning how to shift gears or, as the linguists call it, switch codes.

DJ: Where are you most at home? Is there a path you like to follow, or are you happy to follow whatever path come along? Reading your work, I see a writer who is equally adept at communicating a vision and crafting a story regardless of style. Not many writers have this luxury, or perhaps many writers begin to whittle down their choices over time, finding the place where they feel most “at home.” Have you identified this place, or are you comfortable roving?

JDS: I might get tangled up in semantic games here, but roving might be that place for me. You’ve probably heard about how foxes are supposed to know many things, but hedgehogs know one great thing. With all due respect to the hedgehogs—and you need them to make the world run—I’m one of the foxes who wander all over the place.

Although I still think of myself primarily as a poet, which is probably as much a matter of habit as anything else, I’ve also learned again and again that writing poetry is not something I can sit down and do in the same way that I can write expository prose. I definitely look forward to writing more essays, since essays give me the opportunity to engage in free association in the same way as poetry but without the same demands for compression and heightened language, and with more room for pursuing a line of argument.

In a moment of grandstanding I once told a friend “I want to be an industry.” That doesn’t mean the insane brand leveraging of, say, Hannah Montana, but something more like a one-person studio with a wide range of written “products.” My ideal would be a full-time, multi-faceted writerly life like that of Margaret Atwood or David Mamet.

DJ: One topic or theme that comes up, regardless of form, is our physical/sexual natures. Here again, you approach the topic from a number of perspectives, voices and styles. In your poem, “Coitus,” from Settling for Beauty, you guide the reader with a sense of reverence and distance:

“It is only flesh
Meeting more of the same,

The means for a double helix
To spiral through time.”

Compare this with your article, “An Immodest Proposal”, where you approach the topic with great objectivity, humor, and humanitarianism, proposing Viagra as a way to curb the poaching of endangered animals for aphrodisiacal reasons. Finally, there’s a story like “Pillow Talk”, where the narrator comes across as something of a hapless yet hopeful everyman, obsessing over a certain part of the female anatomy until he moves on to a new obsession.

As you approach a given theme from different angles, do you find that one style or voice tends to inform or affect the others? Though you demonstrate a keen ability to zero in on your subject in a way that fits the form and genre, I’m wondering if your mental partitions are fairly permeable. When you’re sitting over a poem, for instance, do you find another voice trickling in, informing the words that make it to the page?

JDS: This is a challenging question, but the pieces that you bring up invite that line of inquiry. My relationship with my own physicality has always been complicated. In my earlier years I was overweight and experienced an early onset of puberty, and in grade school I was bigger than most of the other children. Then at about the age of thirteen I stopped growing and am now about five-two. That sense of being different and out of sync, combined with depression that wasn’t adequately treated until I was in my thirties, made for an impoverished love life and a feeling there was this big party that almost everyone else was going to, but not me. I spent a lot of time as Cyrano de Bergerac pining after one or another Roxanne who would have been all wrong for me anyway.

In different pieces I have written about the erotic with detachment or some attempt at being straightforward. Still, what’s painful is also the source of humor. Sexual desire and romantic longing cut through a lot of pretension and show us as the needy buffoons that we often are. All of these approaches have their place, considering how complicated Eros is for humans compared to other animals.

There’s a final irony to this situation. Now that I’ve found the right woman and am married, I largely write about less personal subjects. My thinking and writing are largely given over to aesthetic and ethical concerns, and the state of the world at large.

DJ: What are your present concerns, and how do you see them informing your work? How are you, in your work and even in your life, approaching them to create some sort of reconciliation, or at least attempting to find peace with modern times?”

JDS: Predictably, I suppose, my concerns are moving from the issues of youth to the issues of middle age. These are not just the exclusively personal side of coming to grips with mortality and other limitations, like those of energy, ability and financial means, but also how to make some small contribution to the world within those limitations. Or in spite of them.

In even less personal terms, my writing has turned increasingly to how to help people move toward a balanced relationship with the natural world, which to me seems to bring together aesthetic concerns and human self-actualization in terms of both of our evolutionary biology and our spiritual dimensions. I have more questions than answers, but it seems that we ignore the aesthetic aspects of life at our peril, short-term savings aside. To take just a couple of examples, what happens to food and architecture in the name of efficiency and narrowly defined cost-cutting boggles the mind.

A related issue is how to cut through the thickets of media overstimulation and reclaim consciousness so as to find an authentic relationship with the world and oneself. There’s a lot of media analysis out there, but a lot of it bogs down in theory and academic jargon or simply doesn’t bother to explain why we should engage in what Iggy Pop once called “psychic defense.”

DJ: From here, then, perhaps it’s a question of process for you. Do you go to a different place depending on genre, style, form, etc., or do you drink from the same well using different cups?

JDS: For the most part, different pieces of writing suggest themselves to me in different forms. It took me a long time to learn to listen rather than impose my ideas. I don’t want to get too mystical about saying “where the poem leads me” and such, but I usually know from the beginning what should be a formal or free verse poem, what should be an essay, and what should be a piece of fiction. For a long time I thought of myself only as a poet and tried to turn everything into a poem, which seemed to involve less work, but I only ended up with a lot more failed poems than successful poems. Writing pieces in their most appropriate form may entail more work, but it leads to far less frustration.

DJ: Consider a poem like “Bout” and a short story like “This Time”. Both play with concepts of violence and defeat, yet do so in completely different ways. Reading these, I see a writer who wants to explore a topic from as many angles as possible. Or is it more unconscious than that, where you are simply willing to follow the muse wherever she takes you, whether it’s a 10-line poem or a 2000 word short that appears in a place like Thuglit.com?

JDS: To me, at least, the two ideas you stated may be complementary rather than mutually exclusive. I spend a lot of time ruminating about things from a variety of angles, and some of those thoughts turn into what I write. Many other thoughts, perhaps most of them, do not turn into written work. Of course, I don’t know which part of my daydreaming is “productive” until well after the fact. Writing about topics from different perspectives is also a way of arguing with myself and trying to escape a purely binary mode of thought, something our technologies increasingly impose on us.

Violence is a subject that particularly troubles and engages me. I am squeamish and mild-mannered—I have witnesses for both—but I can’t bring myself to the purity of being a pacifist in the world as we find it. Violence can be great fun to read and write about—or see on screen—but violence also serves as a symptom of other disorders and it places a story or poem in the tradition of the cautionary tale. The work of Flannery O’Connor comes to mind in this regard.

DJ: Tell me a little about your latest work, The Best Mariachi in the
World. Where does a book like this fit in, where did the initial concept come from, and how does it relate to what’s come before? Or, is it a case where the relation doesn’t matter beyond the fact that it has your name on it?

JDS: This book is a very recent publication, but its history goes back to 1997, before my first book of poetry was accepted for publication. I wrote the first draft while commuting by train from my parents’ home in Aurora, Illinois to one or the other of my two part-time, no-benefits jobs in Chicago. I didn’t want those jobs to seem like the only thing I was accomplishing, and I was starting to realize that the only way I would really make anything of myself was through writing. (Some of my earlier plans hadn’t worked out, or I just hadn’t wanted them enough.)

I didn’t have anything to lose besides ink and paper, and I started with a premise that ranges somewhere between wacky and outrageous: Gustavo, a young boy in a family of mariachis, believes that he is the worst mariachi in the world because he cannot play—or isn’t even allowed to play—any of the instruments. I am not musical or from a musical family myself, and I am not of Mexican or other Hispanic ancestry, so I was going out on a limb in addressing these subjects. Working through the story allowed me to figure out that what Gustavo could do at that point was sing, and his family and others applaud him for his ability. It later became clear to me that I had written an allegory of my own attempts to find my way. There were plenty of things I couldn’t do, but I could write, and that would be accepted. For others that thing might be in the arts or in another field altogether, but finding and embracing it is crucial. I dedicated the book in part to all the Gustavos of the world, because almost all of us are Gustavo at one time or another. The only exception might be those blessed few who at the age of five know what they want to be when they grow up and happily follow through with that.

DJ: So if someone was to pin you in a corner and say, “OK J.D. Smith, explain what in the world is going on here,” how would you answer? Personally, it’s inspiring to see a writer approach so many areas of interest with such lightness. Does hopping back and forth between genres, voices and styles help you maintain a certain level of dexterity, allowing you to eschew the moniker of “Jack of all trades” and instead embody the concept of “Master of many”? If there’s a
thread that weaves through your entire body of work, what would it be?

JDS: If someone pinned me in a corner I would first say “Please don’t hit me in the face” and then “I don’t have anything of value—I’m a writer.”

More seriously, I am reminded of one of Goya’s late etchings, a self-portrait of the artist walking on crutches in his eighties. The illustration bears the inscription “I am still learning.” That was true: he explored new techniques and media until the end of his life. This lesson was delivered to me more directly at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference in 1992, when William Matthews, my instructor, looked over my poems of wildly varying quality and said, “You’re still finding out what you can do.” And I am still finding out what I can do. I haven’t written a full-length play, for instance. I haven’t written a novel, either, and I’m starting to get some serious peer pressure on that count. I might try and fail miserably, but I’m starting to feel secure enough to live with that.

Writing in different voices and genres allows me to stay fresh mentally, and it also means that I always have something to work on, whether that means a first draft or a revision. And there are many revisions. Crossing genres also helps me to resist complacency. If I’m having good luck in writing or publishing in one genre, there remains the question that would sound something like “What else are you doing, tough guy?”

It’s hard to say what ties all of my work together, but a few ideas come to mind. The first is an interest in the sound of language, especially its rhythms. I learned this initially through poetry, but I’d like to think it comes through in prose as well. I’m also interested in how much meaning can be packed into a given amount of text through word choice, connotation and economy in language, as well as through syntax. I would also like to think that what I write, even if it’s a piece that’s seen as entertainment, carries some intellectual and moral weight and helps to enhance readers’ sense of being alive and engaged in the world.