Literary Activism

I get to meet one of my top literary heroes next month in Pittsburgh, Dave Eggers, who’s promoting his latest book, The Monk of Mokha. Eggers is one of my heroes, not so much because of all his literary success, but mostly his early shorter works or stories and his involvement with the now national after school child programming called 826 that he started over a decade ago.

826 has boasts eight chapters, or centers, where kids can get help with writing and reading outside of school. I visited one of them in Ann Arbor years ago. Each center is themed around something different: a pirate supply store, a robot store, a time travel mart. One of the most developmentally important times of my life as a fiction author was my mid-twenties reading Dave Egger’s works A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, How We Are Hungry, and You Shall Know Our Velocity.

My favorite work by him is a short story called, “The Only Meaning of the Oil-Wet Water.” I’m hoping to get a deluxe, hardbound edition of How We Are Hungry, which contains the above story, during his visit.

I also have new fiction in the Bending Genres latest release here.