Though his stories often contain lurid descriptions of intercourse and body parts, Steve Almond is ardently not a “sex writer.” This is an important point for him, because it’s not the impression one gets from reading reviews of his debut short story collection, My Life in Heavy Metal. The Houston Chronicle compared him with Henry Miller. Kirkus Reviews said the book was full of “love, or at least sex, everywhere in dirty brilliances.” And the online magazine Salon noted Almond’s “ability to describe the mechanics, the emotions, the raw energy of sex in such a way that you get a soaring—and sometimes searing—experience of it.”
And while Almond’s not complaining—those same critics have almost nothing but praise for the book—he nonetheless bristles at the idea of being pigeonholed as a writer solely for the salacious and horny. “Well that’s marketing,” he says. “Is it upsetting? Sure. I wasn’t trying to write a sex book. I was trying to write a book about what it feels like to be heartbroken, why we throw our bodies before our hearts over and over again. Those bad deals we make. But I think readers get that.”
In fact, it’s hard to say exactly what kind of a writer Almond is. His stories mostly deal with the tumultuous topography of modern-day relationships, but they come at it from a range of characters and settings—from a recently widowed professor to a thirtysomething female reporter, from El Paso to Katowice, Poland. But whatever the category, Almond’s writing is riveting; the characters rise from the page emotionally bared. They fumble and make mistakes, desperate for physical and spiritual connection. “We only have a limited amount of love and compassion that we can spend on people,” Almond says. “Who do we choose to spend it on and what are the consequences of those choices? That’s one of the central concerns in my life.”
Almond, who teaches creative writing at Boston College, is animated, at times frenetic—in his own words, a “babbler.” Part of his energy may come from the sudden rush of a major book release for a 35-year-old author who didn’t even start writing fiction until his mid-20s. Upon graduating from Wesleyan University, he went to work for the El Paso Times as a feature writer and after a few years moved to Miami to work for a local alternative weekly, Miami New Times. It was in Miami, Almond says, that his interest in creative writing really took off.
“The managing editor had gotten an MFA, really knew language, and we clicked immediately, and he became my editor and he sort of guided me; he let me do these 3,000- to 5,000-word stories,” he says. When Almond started writing short fiction during his free time, it was his managing editor who suggested that Almond get an MFA himself. He went to UNC-Greensboro, where he served as the fiction editor of the school’s literary journal. After graduating, he moved to Boston, began teaching at Emerson College and soon moved to his present position.
But while Almond has published 53 short stories in addition to those in Heavy Metal, he says he has yet to commit himself to being a full-time fiction writer. Nonfiction, particularly freelance journalism, is still a big part of his life, and he says that while he’s tried writing a few novels, none of them has been up to his standards. For now, he continues writing short stories, some of which appear on his Web site at www.stevenalmond.com. That’s probably the right call—the abbreviated, emotionally intense form seems to best fit his personality. In fact, readers of My Life in Heavy Metal might be surprised to find how closely the lives of some of Almond’s characters mirror his own—a fact the author makes no apologies for. “It’s pretty damn autobiographical,” he says. “And if it’s not me, it’s friends of mine, and if it’s not an exact thing that happened, it’s the terrain that I know, as somebody who’s pretty much had a lot of romantic disasters and been heartbroken about it.”
The first and title story is about a young reporter at—surprise—an El Paso newspaper in the 1980s whose ongoing assignment is to cover heavy metal concerts. “That really tries to capture what it was like to have that kind of quick dirty ego trip of, ‘Oh my God, I have a byline,’ ” Almond says. “It was a real kick in the pants.” Other stories track similar Almond-esque characters: “Run Away, My Pale Love” is about a graduate student who follows his girlfriend to Poland; “The Body in Extremis” tells of a 30-year-old who moves to Boston to teach freshman composition at an unnamed college.
But other stories run far afield. The narrator of “Geek Player, Love Slayer” is a woman who falls in love with her office’s computer technician. “How to Love a Republican” is about a relationship between two political operatives—one liberal, one conservative. And “Among the Ik” watches as an aging anthropologist, whose wife has recently died, tells his daughter’s boyfriend about having to go to the morgue to identify a student’s body.
“I think ‘Among the Ik’ is one of the finest, if not the finest, story I’ve been able to write,” Almond says. “And I’m just absolutely stunned that it came out of me. Like Randall Jarrell, the poet, used to say, you get six poems from on high and the rest you have to work for. That was one that just came to me and came out of me.”
Steve Almond takes part in “New Voices: Reclaiming the Art of the Short Story,” 1-2:30 p.m. Oct. 12 in Conf. Room IA, Main Public Library.
