One of my former students, Eddie Brennan, sent me this story today. Eddie was on the postgrad (MLitt) program I set up in Stirling, and is a very accomplished comedic writer. David Sedaris is one of his big heroes and influences, so recently Eddie went to hear him read at the festival in Edinburgh.
Eddie reports:
"I met David Sedaris again on Saturday and had an amazing ten-minute chat with him before his show. We were talking about the MLitt and he was really interested in it so I gave him one of my stories, Poseidon. Would you believe it, he shook my hand and thanked me for it!
It's the last story in my dissertation and suitably crude and silly. I told him it was a sort of homage to one of his stories called Big Boy. 'Oh! That sounds fun,' he said, laughing. 'Seriously, I'll read that later.' That was 40 minutes before the show.
After his reading he always holds a Q&A session with the fans. Someone asked him if he'd learned any new interesting Edinburgh words this time in Scotland. Sedaris keeps a little notepad in his shirt pocket and he pulled it out. I nearly wet my pants when he consulted it and said, 'Yes I have. I just learned the word "jobbie!" That's a turd, right?' Jobbie was in the second line of my story! Isn't that just amazing!
Then, when I read how he signed my book, he had written, 'Eddie, we meet again, author.' How cool is it when your hero is just actually so decent, so down to earth and so worthy of being your hero?"
I like David Sedaris.
Some new posts up on Everybody Needs Two or Three Friends, y'all. I'm much more assiduous over there.
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