Steve Almond Steve Almond is the author of the story collections The Evil B. B. Chow and My Life in Heavy Metal. His other books are Candyfreak and a novel he co-wrote with Julianna Baggott, Which Brings Me to You. His stories have appeared in Playboy, Zoetrope, The Missouri Review, and other magazines. He teaches creative writing at Boston College. Recently Steve was kind enough to talk to us about The Evil B. B. Chow and other questions we've been dying to ask. Caffeine Destiny: When you put together a short story collection, are you mindful of overlapping themes, or is that something that happens on its own? Steve Almond: Hopefully, it happens on its own. With B.B. Chow I really just chose my favorite dozen unpublished stories, with no thought to how they might mesh. But what happens, if you're writing truthfully, is that your obsessions and concerns emerge in all of your work. So, in the case of B.B. Chow, this theme of forgiveness runs through the stories. But it's not something I plan. That's for the marketing people. I'm only interested in getting my characters into danger and seeing them through the worst of it. This collection seems to have a larger range than My Life in Heavy Metal. Did you notice that too? Is that a result of your being older and wiser, or something else? I was twelve years old when I felt I needed more than just the word love to let my mother know how much she meant to me. Of course, I ended up using clichés and the word love over and over in all the poems I wrote to her. That was the beginning. Does a short story ever start to feel like something you might consider working into a novel, or are you very conscious of the fact that you are writing short stories? Most novels that come from short stories are great for 50 pages, then fade. I'm not interested in that. Short stories are my favorite form because they have a compression, an intensity, that novels generally don't. What I'm interested in, for the most part, is the moment of emotional danger. How does your teaching life interact with your writing life? Mostly, teaching just gives me a lot of energy. It's a powerful thing to have a dozen or so young writers in a room all hell-bent on getting at the ugliest truths inside them. And it doesn't really matter whether they're successful or not with a particular story. It's the effort that's so fucking amazing to me. These kids, 21, 22 years old, and they have the courage to feel that deeply. It gives me some kind of hope for the species. What was the last book you read that kept you up at night, reading? The last book that really blew the doors off for me was "The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo" by Peter Orner. It's a masterpiece. The sentences are just astonishing. What are you working on right now? I just finished a book of essays, and my wife is expecting a baby any minute now, so I'm mostly just poking at smaller pieces. What three words best describe your childhood? Lonely, competitive, sad. I suspect a lot of writers would agree. How would you express yourself creatively if you were no longer able to write? Mime.