Steve Almond

On the 12th of March in the year 2013 an amazing writer named Steve Almond came to give a lecture about his writing on the themes of love and desire, and a certain prosthetics and orthotics major who attended his lecture would never be the same again. In all seriousness Mr. Almond was a fantastic lecturer and if given the chance I would most definitely attend another lecture given by him, he had an amazing presence and charismatic control of the audience which let it be known that this was an open forum for any kind of question. However keep in mind that it was no holds barred on his end and that if you asked a question you were going to get your answer regardless of whether or not you were really ready for the answer. Mr. Almond had the amazing ability to take 2 of the things in this world that make me the most uncomfortable, put them together, and make a rather nice story about called Skull. Based on my chosen field of studies you can assume one of two things about me, either A. that I am an amputee fetishist, or B. that I am terrified of amputee fetishists. I hate to spoil it for you but I fall in the latter category, anything involving that subject is incredibly uncomfortable for me, after all I'm trying to put them back together once they've been stripped down not strip them down and then put them back together. Therefore addressing that this is a unique career issue that people come across from time to time is something that I have wholly avoided thus far no thanks to Mr. Almond! The other factor to my discomfort was the graphicness of his sex scenes, graphic literary sex scenes are something that I have never been too keen on, after all when you follow a character you watch them grow and surmount obstacles, its like watching a dear friend progress through a period in their life, and do you really want to watch your dear friends describe sex on a brutally honest level? I certainly hope not. All of this being said I am glad that this happened because while he took me to a peak of some very extreme discomfort he didn't leave me there, just like the main narrator of his story, he took us there and back to the safe place of understanding without abandoning the reader or the character.  The way Mr. Almond treats his characters is the way a lot of people wish they could confront life, a gentle hand pushing them towards both good and bad but never ever abandoning them along the way. When he read Skull aloud I was shocked, but by the end of it once I had taken a moment to process everything I appreciated that Mr. Almond was such a fantastic writer, I wasn't alone in my experience, I was right there with the narrator sitting on his couch internally begging his buddy to not continue down the path of over sharing, and while we were both powerless to stop the experience (a feeling akin to watching a train wreck: frozen by the horror but its too good to look away) we are wiser people for it. The way that Mr. Almond applies the themes of love and desire to his work is amazing to put it simply,  He treats it as a challenge to himself as a writer to be able to successfully portray this complex set of human feelings. Sure he could have chosen a different set of equally complex feelings like grief and misery, but by portraying love and desire he challenges himself to work past the cliche fantasy of love that most art forms abuse. Just like he noted in his lecture that pornography is the fantasy of sex, I saw a parallel that most mediums in the art world are a fantasy of love but that desire has the unique ability to persist as something not quite artificial in either portrayal.