When the two focuses of this humble blog collide

Cleveland and literature, I like to think, have a few things in common; for example, both are bastions of glittery gems that don't scream out their existence, but rather require a little bit of work for them to be found. This isn't necessarily the way things should be, but it does give the two worlds a certain sort of allure to those who are tuned in to their unique joys. (Also, Cleveland is home to damn fine beer, and literature goes well with a nice pint. One might also say that both Cleveland and literature sometimes get bad raps due to their hidden-gems natures, but I'm wary of overextending the comparison and finding myself spouting nonsense. Pretty soon I'll be claiming that Cleveland is made of paper and literature is made of asphalt.)

So maybe it's understandable that I get a little happy when I find out that the two worlds collide; see also Maureen McHugh and Grant Bailie. And of course the always-entertaining George Bilgere. I've suspected for a time there's plenty of other literary gems lurking about town who I've missed due to my own incompetence and/or laziness. So goes my mental state when I open up the Mac's Backs upcoming events e-mail today:

Our book club has been meeting for about 10 years. It's on the 2nd Wednesday each month at 7:30 p.m. and on August 17th we will be discussing Dan Chaon's terrific novel You Remind Me of Me, a nuanced look at fate and identity. Dan will attend the session to answer questions and sign books.

The name sounded familiar, as if I'd seen his name mentioned before but, due to the fact that on a daily basis I see the names of approximately billions of authors I haven't read yet, I couldn't remember where. So I did a little Googling to find out if he's a known writer and to find out what would bring him to Cleveland for a book discussion session and to find out if I'd want to take off a Wednesday night from my own struggling through trying to string sentences together into coherent pieces of story-telling to go sit in a room with him and some other people where I'd feel my total lack of social grace choking off my breathing and making my heart beat irrationally hard, to find out that he's come to Cleveland because he lives here, and that he's important enough to have his 2001 book of short stories, Among the Missing, be a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award (among other accolades), and that yes, I think I will be picking up a copy of You Remind Me of Me and reading through it in hopes of coming up with some kind of semi-intelligent question for him. (As I am horrible at coming up with good questions for any situation in which a question is called for, I'll happily take suggestions from the peanut gallery, if there's something you're dying to know. Who knows, I might even remember enough of what he says to report back to you with something resembling his answer.)