The best thing I did the other night was to decide to join Malia Lazu at Emerson’s Paramont theater 
for an intimate book reading and signing by Walter Mosley. Future Boston Alliance co-organized the event as well as Mosley’s eleven day “Obsessive Residency” with ArtsEmerson. I knew Malia as co-founder of Future Boston Alliance but I came to also learn about her long standing friendship with Walter Mosley. Author of over 40 books, he has won awards including a Grammy and PEN America’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Easy to see why! We learned first hand that his parents read to him as a kid, that he began drawing incessantly at age twelve – and hasn’t stopped, and that he writes something every day. When asked – he stated “a writer, writes something.” All the time. They write.I attended the more mundane evening launch of his new book The Graphomaniac’s Primer – A semi surrealist memoir. The evening was anything but mundane. The editor didn’t like Walter’s choice of front cover, but he loved the back cover and in our fresh off the press, evening before the official release edition of the memoir – what was the back final page is now also – the front cover. This is the book that Walter Mosley calls “The literary home shopping network.”
Another interesting part of listening in on this intimate conversation he was having with Boston Globe Columnist Adrian Walker and us, was watching unfold, the path of enlightenment as he discovered that he was a graphomaniac.
The revelation came somewhere in the middle of an overgrown letter O but it also might have been during the escape of the letter S from its assigned space while he wrestled to push it back into line. You really needed to be there to watch the story unfold in a most amazing way.
