Star-struck isn’t something I feel too often. Fondness, respect, admiration—these are regular parts of my life as a reader, in particular. But with a few folks I can’t get past that feeling that the legend of the person overshadows any chance I might have at a normal interaction with them. I love Jim Harrison’s work, but I think I could sit down to a gourmet meal with him and shoot the shit. If Larry Levis were still alive I’d buy him drinks and offer to light his smoke. But Sherman Alexie. I don’t know how I would talk to him.
I’ve written him many letters over the years, but I have never sent a single one. I just wrote another one this morning and this time I’m determined to put it in the mail.
Like many other writers, I just returned from this year’s AWP conference in Denver where, among other amazing things, I saw Sherman Alexie read at a Beloit Poetry Journal event. During the conference, I met up with old friends, made some new ones, chatted casually with Pulitzer-prize winners and many fabulous writers. I stayed out too late and had fun doing it. But Alexie’s reading made all the extra costs and slight discomforts, the feeling of being a lonely anonymous shape among 8,000 other mostly-lonely-anonymous shapes, worth all of it.
So what is it? What puts the twinkle in my eye when I speak of him? What makes him different?
I’ve been reading his books—poetry and prose—for years and they were some of the first books that really gave me the sense that I could do anything with my own writing. Not that I already had the skill or means to make anything work, but that I didn’t need to feel so confined in certain ways of approaching the world.
I think there is a sort of one way intimacy that makes a possible personal interaction strange and uncomfortable. From his words, I feel I know his mind. Even if it is a trickster mind. Inside the words I forget that he doesn’t know me. To chat with him would be like talking to a best friend with Alzheimer’s. “You mean you don’t remember anything about me?”
Okay, maybe that’s stretching it a bit far, but I think I’m getting closer to understanding what it is I mean to say. Perhaps it is because in his writing, Sherman wears so many different, but very convincing masks, that I’m not sure who I would be talking to. I think, without knowing for sure, that I can see Jim Harrison in his words. The same is true for Levis and countless other writers I care deeply for. Even another trickster like T.C. Boyle.
To resolve this rather complicated non-issue I have waited a long time to make sure that what I have to say is something of substance. I’m glad I haven’t gone up to him at a reading yet just to offer the same bland comment—however heartfelt—he hears all the time. I’m also glad I didn’t chase him down in Denver to ramble and stutter about his work (his work!) striking him as a crazy person to be avoided or forgotten. No, I waited. And now I’ll send a letter that says what I have long wanted to say, so that if we meet someday I can at least pretend he knows me a little, too.