Book Review: Thieves I've Known

My first creative writing class was also the first course Tom Kealey taught as a Stegner fellow at Stanford. I was an impressionable freshman and the class convinced me to get a minor in creative writing. Soft spoken, insightful, and understanding, he weathered me through my first few attempts at writing. He was early enough in his career to both understand my motivations and aspirations as well as remember that terribly steep learning curve as a writer. Through my undergraduate years, writing was always a challenge; my premed classes were easy. Writing kept me up late at night.

Only recently did I get a chance to read Thieves I've Known, a collection of short stories. The winner of the 2012 Flannery O'Connor Award, it is a loosely related collection of stories with vaguely overlapping characters. One of the unifying themes is the age of the main characters; all are at that brink of transformation from child to adult, the short story bildungsroman. Brilliant with dialogue, the stories succinctly capture a sense of the soul searching for answers, the bridging of estranged relationships, and the encountering of something dark. Although you can tell the stories come from the early part of an author's career, they bubble with potential. When I read the stories, I can actually hear Tom's voice reading them in my head.

It's been a while since I picked up a short story collection, and even longer since I thought about my college mentors. Thieves I've Known has been a genuine pleasure.

Image shown under Fair Use, from goodreads.com.