6 Important Writerly Questions with Gary M. Almeter
Meet Gary M. Almeter. He’s an attorney, an author of multiple novels (including the exquisite The Emperor of Ice-Cream), and a co-host of the Humorist-aligned podcast The Official Dream Dinner Party Podcast, an extension of his book The Official Dream Dinner Party Handbook. And with his best friend Reese Cassard, he’s the author of the wickedly funny and shockingly accurate new comedy title Red Tie, Blue Tie: How to Tell Whether Someone is Liberal or Conservative in Any Possible Scenario.
1. Who are you? What are you doing here?
You know how sometimes writers exert themselves whilst crafting their prose, to wit, like how John Steinbeck traveled extensively, living and working alongside migrant workers during the Great Depression to capture their plight while writing The Grapes of Wrath, and how Emily Dickinson’s reclusive lifestyle and intense focus on her inner life and literary craft was both a result of and a catalyst for her prolific writing and a life marked by solitude and introspection, and how Leo Tolstoy spent six years writing War and Peace by immersing himself in the history and culture of early 19th-century Russia? Like that but just less so. I’m an attorney and humor writer who loves to write, loves to make people laugh, and loves to see his name in print.
2. Since “Where do you get your ideas?” is a terrible question, what made you want to write this book?
Reese had the original idea and we collaborated on a list published in or on McSweeney’s in December 2022. People liked it so we decided to collaborate on a book. Identity politics is such a funny thing — not funny ha ha but funny like interesting and newish and amorphous and unnavigable — so the idea of taking our collective thumbnail and collectively scratching beneath the collective surface to collectively ask, “who are we?” and generating more nuanced responses, to wit, “I am a Baltimorean,” “I am an attorney,” “I drive a Ford Explorer,” “I am a pickleball player,” “I eat Chipotle,” “I wear Nike Air Monarchs when I barbecue,” “When I steal cabbage from the grocery store, I hide it in my jacket,” etc.
3. How did you keep writing this book?
In the Introduction, Reese calls the book “one joke told thousands of different ways,” which is apt. While there are endless ways to tell the joke (is this your way of asking us to do a Volume 2?), Reese started toying with the format, to wit, adding some asides and some meta commentary. That made it very fun. There were tasks we had to complete but there was also the possibility that when genius struck, to wit, identifying if the Jolene of whom Dolly Parton sang was liberal or conservative.
4. Who is this book for, anyway?
This book is for anyone who yearns to recognize the import of intersectionality by expanding our concepts of identity in identity politics by recognizing the multifaceted nature of individual identities, to wit, beyond race, beyond gender, and beyond sexuality, to include ersatz intersections of socioeconomic status, shopping habits, music preferences, and more in the hopes that a broader approach will foster inclusivity, understanding, and solidarity across diverse experiences and challenging simplistic categorizations and promoting nuanced, empathetic dialogue and policy. All of those people this book is for.
5. Any darlings you had to kill?
Yes, we had a darling puppy named Cricket. But we had to kill it because it was guilty of canine insubordination.
6. What are you working on now?
I have a Google doc filled with things that I’m working on, to wit, things I’ve overheard that resonate, random ideas, some concepts that won’t go away and I just don’t know what to do with yet. I also grew up near Niagara Falls and am working on a book about it.
Red Tie, Blue Tie: How to Tell Whether Someone is Liberal or Conservative in Any Possible Scenario is available now.
