Gio, a more bookish type whose pro-football playing father named him after James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, narrates most of these stories. We follow them from their brash, confrontational teenage years in Pawtucket, Rhode Island to a search for identity and stability in their late twenties. The stories cover a decade in the lives of four friends: Gio, Dub, Rolls, and Rye. The bulk of the stories in How Are You Going to Save Yourself were written at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. “The words were harsh but they made me think about what part of this process I like the most and that was putting the words together.”Īlong the way Holmes experimented with fantasy literature and poetry before starting to write short stories at Amherst College while studying with Amity Gaige. You should do something else,’ ” Holmes says with a laugh. “One day we were quoting tracks and my friend said, ‘You don’t have the charisma to do this. “All my friends were kind of doing the same thing and that was one of our access points to literature.”Īnd then, at a show in Providence, a close (and very honest) friend changed his life.
“I grew up rapping freestyle,” Holmes says.
But growing up in Rhode Island, Holmes wasn’t thinking about publishing books. JM Holmes’ first book, How Are You Going to Save Yourself, is a blistering collection of linked stories about four friends struggling with the burdens placed on them by society, their families, and their history.
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