I settled in for my flight across the pond with my packet of workshop stories and my journal, prepared to work and studiously ignore the person in the seat next to me. People don’t like to be bothered, and neither do I. After an hour or so of my seatmate typing diligently on his Mac, and me jotting in my journal, I went to the loo and left my books in my seat. When I returned, he said, “That’s a nice journal,” or words to that effect, and so I told him where it came from and we started talking. He was nice enough, and so I yammered on about my MFA, and about my program, and my writing, and when I finally stopped talking about myself and asked him what was working on, he mentioned that he was, you know, preparing for his interview on Fresh Air because his second book just came out. I squealed (politely), crawled into his lap, and asked if he would consider taking me to the studio with him and introducing me to Terry Gross. “I’m pretty sure she’d like to meet me,” I told him, “Because I’m planning to be a famous author some day, and she’d probably like to make my acquaintance, now, before my interview.”
Okay, not really. But I did question him about everything from Kentucky stud horses to word processing for the rest of the flight. His name is Kevin Conley, and you can find his work in the pages of The New Yorker, Men’s Vogue, and GQ.
He was so terribly interesting, and honestly, how often is it that you get to corner someone truly interesting and talk to them for oh, say, 7 hours? He showed me a picture of himself on fire on his laptop. That particular picture graces the book jacket of his latest book, The Full Burn, so you should probably go run out to your local independent bookstore right this minute and buy it. Kevin also promised he would visit my blog, and my feeling about this is, when a guy that’s lit himself on fire comes to call, you have to make an effort.
So, in my limited computer time, here’s a couple more strangers, for Kevin:
Robert
Hear him school me in London geography: [audio http://texasgurl1.fileave.com/11-robert.mp3]
And also Paul, who looks a bit suspicious of me.
[audio http://texasgurl1.fileave.com/9-paul.mp3]
